TheCarp said: if an electical engineer designs his own TV remote control from parts he can buy at radio shack, completely at home and on his own. Then he releases the plans on how to build it... should he be liable if someone builds it and it doesn't work for them? He didn't charge them for the plans. He just said "Here is how I did it, this works for me" Should he suddenly be liable if it doesn't work or causes harm to someone elses TV?
If it simply doesn't work, the person trying to use it isn't harmed (they didn't have a working remote before, and they still don't) so there is nothing to have a liability suit over. But if the remote I build from the guy's plans causes my $500 TV to catch fire and burn my house down, you bet I want him to be liable. I have no way of knowing whether he intentionally published plans that claim to be innocuous but are actually harmful (like an email virus, for example) or whether he just recopied the value wrong on a crucial capacitor. If it's the first, he deserves to pay for my house. If it's the latter, as an engineer he is supposed to build stuff that meets a certain standard and I am trusting that his engineering products, paid for or not, meet that standard. But if I know that I have legal recourse and that I COULD sue the pants off the guy if his device causes damage, I'm more likely to trust his plans because he's aware of this legal recourse too. I'm not just putting my faith in his engineering ethics, I'm also trusting his self-interest (and let's face it, self-interest is more universal than ethics). It's in his own interest to check those capacitors thoroughly before he releases anything, and that liability might make him do so instead of just scanning his scrawled notes and putting them up in PDF form.
Liability is just a legalistic term for "forcing people to take responsibility for their own actions," and that's not a bad thing. Part of the reason open source code is good is that people take responsibility for their own work. The only problems arise when damage awards exceed reason--but usually that requires genuine stupidity by the negligent party. Damage awards that appear outrageous are often sparked by outrageous actions by the company being sued, or else are reduced on appeal.
All the traits that Brin mentions are certainly laudable--politics could gain a lot if more of its practitioners were embarrassed to be caught behaving like children. But he oversimplifies America's actions during the cold war by focusing on the foreign policy Marshall formed and conducted: if only the rest of America's actions had been equally "sober, far-seeing, patient, prescient" and unflappable, the tragedies of at least one war and countless acts of brutality by US-backed dictators could possibly have been avoided.
Brin says "you have only to ask the people of Prague, Warsaw, and a hundred other places how they feel about the outcome." Indeed, the people of Prague might still wonder why nobody came to help them when the Prague Spring (1956?) was crushed by Soviet tanks. Ask the people of Chile, Indonesia, Guatemala, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), anywhere that the US placed a dictator in power and maintained him there by force against the will of the people, how THEY feel about the outcome. They'll probably ask why we stood in the way for so long. These countries may not be paradise even now, but they certainly were not improved by having their self-determination stifled by American decision-makers acting on fear of communism.
Brin also says "Above all, we did not panic and fry this planet. Wasn't that enough?" If he means 'enough to excuse everything else we did that was contrary to all the ideals Americans voice', I'd say no. The Soviets didn't panic and fry the planet either: will you give them equal credit for showing restraint? I didn't think so. The two superpowers both held back from starting the war that would truly have ended all wars, but largely because they had the horrific example of what happened the only time nuclear weapons were used in war. And I think you can recall what country was responsible for that.
George Marshall was a great man, and for all the reasons Brin gives I agree that he would make a marvelous example as person of the century. But don't ascribe his virtues to the rest of the foreign policy establishment that worked with and later succeeded him. Unfortunately, the rest of them are not worthy of the accolade.
Jenny, modern cynic
Perhaps he meant "pilum"
on
Gates of Fire
·
· Score: 1
Which was a short throwing spear, light enough to be carried in multiple. It was standard in the Athenian army, and I believe the spears that Roman legionaires carried were along the same design if not the exact same thing.
And if you're chasing fleeing enemies, it's a lot easier to hit them with a five-foot poking weapon than a two-foot stabbing one.
JennyWL, SCA member and therefore amateur historian
BitPoet said: There are a lot more than 9 computers in the world running -BSD, so you could take a sample on the number of computers running -BSD, and the number of times those computers had to reboot in, say a month.
That would give you the MTBF for BSD, but that's only one part of the product. Storage Station also has a board and one or two hard drives. The MTBF for the complete product is mostly based on MTBF for the moving parts, i.e. the hard drives.
If a woman is going to be that brain dead to choose a guy like that, then she deserves the punishment that she gets. What is making her stay with this guy now? There is nothing stopping her from leaving the guy. If she is worried about her life because the guy is a wife beater, this is the type of thing the police are for.
Couldn't let this one go by. As someone who has supported my local battered women's shelter (and read what they sent me in response) and who knows some others who have been in this situation, I can confidently say that you, sir, are full of shit. Nobody, I mean NOBODY, deserves to be beaten. NOT FOR ANY REASON. And especially not because the guy who was all sweetness and light when she first met him, who really cared about her and paid attention to her, who was interested in what she was doing and wanted to be involved in her life instead of just ignoring her, turned out to be interested and involved because he has some sick need to control others by whatever means he can find.
Abusive people don't go around drooling and randomly attacking people--at least not the ones outside prison and mental institutions. They have learned that society frowns upon that kind of thing, so they have a public face that is really different. And that's what their girlfriends and wives see at first. Then the caring and interest become limits--"Let's not go out tonight", or "I don't really like those friends of yours." Then threats, which are couched as jokes--"Of course I'm kidding, I wouldn't REALLY hit you!" Then they become real, but in between he puts his public face back on, apologizes, buys flowers, cries, does ANYTHING to assure her that he really does love her, he didn't mean it, he'd never do anything like that if she didn't make him so mad.
And she wants to believe that the man she loves, loves her in return. And to keep believing that, she starts to believe that it's her fault. And she tries to not do the things that make him mad--it never works completely, since it really wasn't her fault to start with, but this man has succeeded in completely redefining her reality.
By the time she figures out what is going on, her life is nothing like you can imagine. She has no credit cards, no bank account in her name, no access to the family bank account, she lives on the money he allows her to have (this is one of the most effective control devices these guys have--how can you leave if you can't afford a place to stay?), she has been separated from her family and friends, and most importantly, he has probably threatened to kill her if she leaves him. And the statistics show that most women killed by abusive partners are killed AFTER they try to escape.
Going to the police is of little to no help--most departments don't automatically dismiss domestic complaints as unimportant any more (they used to), but unless a victim is willing to file charges then and there, which requires evidence like recent injuries, all they can do is file a restraining order. That means if he shows up at her new place, he can be arrested. But how long does it take the police to respond in your part of town? And how long does it take a furious guy to shoot someone?
Restraining orders only work on people who are thinking about consequences--abusive partners are only thinking about the fact that they've lost the only person lower than them, and their choices are to either face the fact that they are worthless scum, or take ultimate control back (killing someone is a pretty strong statement of control, after all), or kill themselves. They've spent a lifetime avoiding the first choice, so they take the second. And, since that narrows the remaining choices back to two, they generally do the last as well.
Jenny, who wishes the folks here knew more about this and that she knew less.
Oh, and no-one actually knows what 'love' is. It seems to be an excuse these days, or a word used in place of an apology. I doubt, somehow, that the concept even exists anymore.
Sure it does. There's a lot of people in the world, a whole lot more than there are on the Internet, and a damn sight more than are on/. So the view you get here is a tad skewed by the demographics of the Internet. Not every married couple has been enduring quiet misery for the last several decades. People didn't go in droves to see "Titanic" to feed their cynicism about love. Romance novels, however stupid they are (I've looked at a few, briefly), sell millions each year to women who at least have an idea what love is, or should be, even if it's not a very realistic view. Age has a lot to do with it: when I was 14-20, I had a similarly cynical outlook. Through my 20's I improved slowly, and then I met the mate I didn't know I'd been looking for. We've been married five years now, and I'm 32, and there is no question in my mind that love is for real because I see it every day.
I've got a definition I stole outright from R.A. Heinlein: "Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." Took me a while to reach that conclusion, and I went through a lot of misconceptions beforehand (like many of the women y'all have been talking about, I suppose, although nobody ever laid a hand on this girl in anger), but nobody I've met who has given that sentence serious thought has ever disagreed with it.
You're completely correct though in saying "intelligence and personality is bottom on the list." It is, and it's pathetic. Utterly pathetic..... we all know most women don't look to hard at the intellect part.
Excuse me? Could you possibly find a broader brush with which to tar all women of your age group? Yes, there are lots of shallow women out there who judge on appearance alone. Not only do they assign value to guys based on appearance, they also value themselves based on appearance: they're the ones who are blond (and weren't born that way), and thin, who carefully apply their makeup and style their hair multiple times a day, and who wear high heels, miniskirts, leggings, and other eye candy. And you know what? They get rewarded for this behavior with attention, not just from the guys they are trying to attract, but from all the rest as well. Yes, they will often reject you: but are they Everywoman? Hardly! They might be the only ones you noticed, but they're not the only women there are.
What about the girls who have intelligence and personality but not the looks? In the hell that is high school (where our ideas about this kind of thing are usually formed), those girls often don't even have an alternate identity of "geek" to fall back on--they're just the ugly girls, the fat girls, the social rejects and misfits. And they experience the exact same rejection from guys, including most of the geeks, that you describe receiving from girls. Maybe y'all should look around for the girls who don't fit the artificial standard of desirability. They're the ones in the band, or in the computer room; they're doing things instead of being ornamental, so they might be harder to find; and they may not look like much (for one thing, they know mobility is more important than sexy shoes) but they can speak, and listen (which is a lot more important), and they know what it's like to be rejected based on stupid assumptions that beautiful=good and !beautiful=!good.
Jenny, who is surprised how angry she still is about this fifteen years after high school
Captain Keen said: Who is responsible for determining what is "safe" for kids to view and what is not? Apparantly the Government has ideas in that area.
Or at least certain members of Congress do. Please don't confuse the federal bureaucracy with the Reps and Senators who have to make a name for themselves to assure their reelection: the two groups are often at odds over what the agencies should be doing. This is one reason budget bills take so long to pass: they are the most powerful tool Congress has to micromanage agency business (although summoning agency heads to hearings is another popular approach) and when one group in Congress wants to order certain actions, like increased timber sales or granting export licenses to a particular company, there's usually another group that will fight hard to make sure those actions don't make it into the final version of the budget.
There isn't a single federal agency that wants to get into the business of deciding what people can and can't say online: they know it's not only a no-win situation (because people's standards and tolerances vary) but also contrary to the 1st Amendment. But members of Congress have no compunctions about advocating positions that they think will get them votes, even if they are clearly illegal: when I was a fed, our agency once received direct instructions in our appropriation bill to spend money in a way that violated federal law. Congressfolk pander to groups that can promise them votes, and socially conservative groups promise that waving the banner of "child protection" will bring in the votes.
If the government made cars, a Chevy would cost $80,000 and you would have to refill the gas tank every 10 blocks.
This is a cute phrase, but do you have any evidence to back it up? Some vehicles actually made by governments: the East German Trabant--badly unreliable but dirt cheap, reasonably good gas mileage because gas was, and is, so expensive in Europe; the HumVee--really pretty reliable, can handle terrain that your Ford Explorer can't but costs some $150K and gets, I believe, similar gas mileage to passenger cars; the original Jeep--reliable, cheap, I don't know its gas mileage off hand but I know there weren't gas stations every 10 blocks in the jungles where they went. Some expensive, some not, none as fuel-inefficient as you claim.
I do not recall anything in the constitution delegating censorship or ratings to the Federal government, and I seem to recall something about all unlisted powers being sent to the state, in which case regulations are at the wrong level.
You're right about censorship not being a delegated federal power, but that hasn't kept the government from exercising it. One of the first laws passed by the first Congress was the Sedition Act, which made speaking against the government, in voice or in print, an act of treason punishable by death. And some people were actually executed for it while the Revolutionary War was still going on. The Supreme Court later struck this one down as contrary to the First Amendment, but not until a few decades later (!) As to unlisted responsibilities, you're thinking of the Reserved Powers clause (near the end of the Constitution), which does indeed say that any powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. But regulation of interstate commerce is one power specifically reserved to the federal government (in an earlier clause) and since the telephone system was ruled as interstate commerce the Internet is considered the same. You wouldn't want state-by-state regulation of the Internet: that could cause foolishnes like not being able to send email to Kansas advocating the theory of evolution. Of course federal regulation could be just as bad, but then the 1st Amendment-based lawsuits to overturn stupid laws only have to be filed once instead of 50 times.
Sounds like you subscribe to the "good enemy" concept--you know, a good enemy is one you have to stretch to your limits to beat. The problem seems to be that Microsoft can't be beaten by playing fair, i.e. competing on the merits of the product. This is because Microsoft DOESN'T compete strictly on the merits of their product (how could they?), and the kinds of "cheating" they engage in really make the most of their company's other advantages: they have the resources to seriously influence buying patterns through FUD and "creative benchmarking", they have the bucks to acquire competing technologies so they can incorporate or eliminate them, and they have the market clout to set defacto standards or to "embrace and extend", i.e. subvert, negotiated standards, as the Halloween documents revealed.
Against these fairly awesome forces, the open-source community has what? Good sense (individually), good processes (generally), great code, and personal motivation. These are important things, but they noticeably don't include good marketing, solid representation in standards-creating bodies, and political clout. Yes, I said political clout: Microsoft would have been slapped down hard years ago if another organization with serious pull had gone after all the legal wrongs they've done.
I agree that the open source seems to need something to rally against, but I don't think the Evil Empire is exactly it: open source began because people wanted code that was good, and free. So what they're rallying against is code that is bad, and/or expensive (and closed-source). Microsoft is a putrid example of all these things, and as the largest such example is an easy target, but if Bill Gates had stayed at Harvard and become a lawyer or something there would still be bad expensive code out there, and I believe the open source community would be just as fervently creating alternatives to it. In fact, I think the open source community will be continually pushed to better things as long as they remain the underdogs: almost any individual company could fill the "good enemy" role. If open source "wins", and closed source becomes the anomaly instead of the rule, then I think the community would struggle to redefine itself. But I don't see that happening soon, and breaking up Microsoft won't bring this about all by itself.
Remande said: The Constitution give the people the right to free speech. Microsoft is not a "people", it is a corporation....the company no longer is an extension of the person but becomes its own legal entity (though not a person).
All true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately for the rights of actual people in the US, the court system began extending the free-speech provisions in the Constitution to corporations several years back. Some odd things can grow out of this precedent. For example, one of the lawsuits over campaign finance reform resulted in a ruling that restricting campaign contributions unfairly limited people's right to free expression (though not speech per se), in that supporting a political party is a form of expressing your opinion. This doctrine has been called "One dollar, one vote," and consider this: if corporations have the same rights to free expression as people, then according to this doctrine a corporation could contribute millions to a party. Well guess what? They do exactly that--we have the best system money can buy! So even though corporations are not people, they are allowed some of the same rights as people, and worse yet they have far more funding with which to take advantage of those rights.
It has been said that freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one: freedom of speech belongs to all but is a lot more significant for the person who owns a bullhorn. And Microsoft can afford a lot more bullhorns than any of us--indeed, in this article we see them buying bullhorns for others to use in their behalf. This legal precedent needs to be abolished, and the sooner the better. Corporations already have more protections than people, and just in the interest of balance they shouldn't have all our rights and privileges too.
We're already two species. There's the homo informaticus to which all reading this belong, and the old homo sapiens that isn't at all sapient to how we are changing it's world.
Sorry, you fail the biology exam. Behavior and knowledge (which is the only difference you describe between your "species") are part of culture, NOT biology. That means that an individual from the tech-ignorant group could, with sufficient education, become a member of the tech-enabled group. No amount of education will turn Washoe into a human, by comparison.
The old species is already nomadic, living hand-to-mouth and at odds with nature.
Got news for you: we tech-enabled bunch are even more at odds with nature. Or did you think that our consumption of tantalum capacitors for cell phones and petroleum to make PalmPilot cases is somehow sustainable? And nomadic? Tuaregs and Australian aborigines are nomadic. Homeless people in the US are sometimes nomadic, but more often they stick to a given territory. The rest of us (some 230 million plus) are definitely not, but I'm sure you don't think all those 230MM are part of homo informaticus. Don't let your enthusiasm for your point inflate your rhetoric beyond all reason.
The new species has been able to avoid the dismal lifestyle of the old through it's fusion with technology.
Maybe YOU have an interface implant behind your ear, but nobody I know does (and I'm sure some of my coworkers would get them if they could). We have adopted technology into our lives, but fusion is considerably more advanced than that: it implies creating a link that can never be dissolved. Pacemakers qualify: PDAs don't.
The fact that we have embraced technology, and evolved thereby, was a willful, convenience driven event. We are dependent on our technology as much as birds are dependent on their ability to fly. To un-plug means death. We may not be left biologically dead without our tech, but our lifestyle, our standard of living, would end. Is that no death?
Ask this question of someone with a gun to their head, or with a terminal disease slowly eroding their body. Or of a bird that relies on its wings to escape from all the other bird-eating life forms out there. If adoption of technology was a convenience-driven event and not a survival-driven one, then by your own words loss of those "conveniences" does not threaten survival. And I doubt that even you would say "Give me my lifestyle or give me death!" Most of us value our lives over our lifestyles.
Slashdot Mirror
TheCarp said: if an electical engineer designs his own TV remote control from parts he can buy at radio shack, completely at home and on his own. Then he releases the plans on how to build it... should he be liable if someone builds it and it doesn't work for them? He didn't charge them for the plans. He just said "Here is how I did it, this works for me" Should he suddenly be liable if it doesn't work or causes harm to someone elses TV?
If it simply doesn't work, the person trying to use it isn't harmed (they didn't have a working remote before, and they still don't) so there is nothing to have a liability suit over. But if the remote I build from the guy's plans causes my $500 TV to catch fire and burn my house down, you bet I want him to be liable. I have no way of knowing whether he intentionally published plans that claim to be innocuous but are actually harmful (like an email virus, for example) or whether he just recopied the value wrong on a crucial capacitor. If it's the first, he deserves to pay for my house. If it's the latter, as an engineer he is supposed to build stuff that meets a certain standard and I am trusting that his engineering products, paid for or not, meet that standard. But if I know that I have legal recourse and that I COULD sue the pants off the guy if his device causes damage, I'm more likely to trust his plans because he's aware of this legal recourse too. I'm not just putting my faith in his engineering ethics, I'm also trusting his self-interest (and let's face it, self-interest is more universal than ethics). It's in his own interest to check those capacitors thoroughly before he releases anything, and that liability might make him do so instead of just scanning his scrawled notes and putting them up in PDF form.
Liability is just a legalistic term for "forcing people to take responsibility for their own actions," and that's not a bad thing. Part of the reason open source code is good is that people take responsibility for their own work. The only problems arise when damage awards exceed reason--but usually that requires genuine stupidity by the negligent party. Damage awards that appear outrageous are often sparked by outrageous actions by the company being sued, or else are reduced on appeal.
JennyWL
All the traits that Brin mentions are certainly laudable--politics could gain a lot if more of its practitioners were embarrassed to be caught behaving like children. But he oversimplifies America's actions during the cold war by focusing on the foreign policy Marshall formed and conducted: if only the rest of America's actions had been equally "sober, far-seeing, patient, prescient" and unflappable, the tragedies of at least one war and countless acts of brutality by US-backed dictators could possibly have been avoided.
Brin says "you have only to ask the people of Prague, Warsaw, and a hundred other places how they feel about the outcome." Indeed, the people of Prague might still wonder why nobody came to help them when the Prague Spring (1956?) was crushed by Soviet tanks. Ask the people of Chile, Indonesia, Guatemala, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), anywhere that the US placed a dictator in power and maintained him there by force against the will of the people, how THEY feel about the outcome. They'll probably ask why we stood in the way for so long. These countries may not be paradise even now, but they certainly were not improved by having their self-determination stifled by American decision-makers acting on fear of communism.
Brin also says "Above all, we did not panic and fry this planet. Wasn't that enough?" If he means 'enough to excuse everything else we did that was contrary to all the ideals Americans voice', I'd say no. The Soviets didn't panic and fry the planet either: will you give them equal credit for showing restraint? I didn't think so. The two superpowers both held back from starting the war that would truly have ended all wars, but largely because they had the horrific example of what happened the only time nuclear weapons were used in war. And I think you can recall what country was responsible for that.
George Marshall was a great man, and for all the reasons Brin gives I agree that he would make a marvelous example as person of the century. But don't ascribe his virtues to the rest of the foreign policy establishment that worked with and later succeeded him. Unfortunately, the rest of them are not worthy of the accolade.
Jenny, modern cynic
Which was a short throwing spear, light enough to be carried in multiple. It was standard in the Athenian army, and I believe the spears that Roman legionaires carried were along the same design if not the exact same thing.
And if you're chasing fleeing enemies, it's a lot easier to hit them with a five-foot poking weapon than a two-foot stabbing one.
JennyWL, SCA member and therefore amateur historian
BitPoet said: There are a lot more than 9 computers in the world running -BSD, so you could take a sample on the number of computers running -BSD, and the number of times those computers had to reboot in, say a month.
That would give you the MTBF for BSD, but that's only one part of the product. Storage Station also has a board and one or two hard drives. The MTBF for the complete product is mostly based on MTBF for the moving parts, i.e. the hard drives.
If a woman is going to be that brain dead to choose a guy like that, then she deserves the punishment that she gets. What is making her stay with this guy now? There is nothing stopping her from leaving the guy. If she is worried about her life because the guy is a wife beater, this is the type of thing the police are for.
Couldn't let this one go by. As someone who has supported my local battered women's shelter (and read what they sent me in response) and who knows some others who have been in this situation, I can confidently say that you, sir, are full of shit. Nobody, I mean NOBODY, deserves to be beaten. NOT FOR ANY REASON. And especially not because the guy who was all sweetness and light when she first met him, who really cared about her and paid attention to her, who was interested in what she was doing and wanted to be involved in her life instead of just ignoring her, turned out to be interested and involved because he has some sick need to control others by whatever means he can find.
Abusive people don't go around drooling and randomly attacking people--at least not the ones outside prison and mental institutions. They have learned that society frowns upon that kind of thing, so they have a public face that is really different. And that's what their girlfriends and wives see at first. Then the caring and interest become limits--"Let's not go out tonight", or "I don't really like those friends of yours." Then threats, which are couched as jokes--"Of course I'm kidding, I wouldn't REALLY hit you!" Then they become real, but in between he puts his public face back on, apologizes, buys flowers, cries, does ANYTHING to assure her that he really does love her, he didn't mean it, he'd never do anything like that if she didn't make him so mad.
And she wants to believe that the man she loves, loves her in return. And to keep believing that, she starts to believe that it's her fault. And she tries to not do the things that make him mad--it never works completely, since it really wasn't her fault to start with, but this man has succeeded in completely redefining her reality.
By the time she figures out what is going on, her life is nothing like you can imagine. She has no credit cards, no bank account in her name, no access to the family bank account, she lives on the money he allows her to have (this is one of the most effective control devices these guys have--how can you leave if you can't afford a place to stay?), she has been separated from her family and friends, and most importantly, he has probably threatened to kill her if she leaves him. And the statistics show that most women killed by abusive partners are killed AFTER they try to escape.
Going to the police is of little to no help--most departments don't automatically dismiss domestic complaints as unimportant any more (they used to), but unless a victim is willing to file charges then and there, which requires evidence like recent injuries, all they can do is file a restraining order. That means if he shows up at her new place, he can be arrested. But how long does it take the police to respond in your part of town? And how long does it take a furious guy to shoot someone?
Restraining orders only work on people who are thinking about consequences--abusive partners are only thinking about the fact that they've lost the only person lower than them, and their choices are to either face the fact that they are worthless scum, or take ultimate control back (killing someone is a pretty strong statement of control, after all), or kill themselves. They've spent a lifetime avoiding the first choice, so they take the second. And, since that narrows the remaining choices back to two, they generally do the last as well.
Jenny, who wishes the folks here knew more about this and that she knew less.
Oh, and no-one actually knows what 'love' is. It seems to be an excuse these days, or a word used in place of an apology. I doubt, somehow, that the concept even exists anymore.
/. So the view you get here is a tad skewed by the demographics of the Internet. Not every married couple has been enduring quiet misery for the last several decades. People didn't go in droves to see "Titanic" to feed their cynicism about love. Romance novels, however stupid they are (I've looked at a few, briefly), sell millions each year to women who at least have an idea what love is, or should be, even if it's not a very realistic view. Age has a lot to do with it: when I was 14-20, I had a similarly cynical outlook. Through my 20's I improved slowly, and then I met the mate I didn't know I'd been looking for. We've been married five years now, and I'm 32, and there is no question in my mind that love is for real because I see it every day.
.... we all know most women don't look to hard at the intellect part.
Sure it does. There's a lot of people in the world, a whole lot more than there are on the Internet, and a damn sight more than are on
I've got a definition I stole outright from R.A. Heinlein: "Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." Took me a while to reach that conclusion, and I went through a lot of misconceptions beforehand (like many of the women y'all have been talking about, I suppose, although nobody ever laid a hand on this girl in anger), but nobody I've met who has given that sentence serious thought has ever disagreed with it.
You're completely correct though in saying "intelligence and personality is bottom on the list." It is, and it's pathetic. Utterly pathetic.
Excuse me? Could you possibly find a broader brush with which to tar all women of your age group? Yes, there are lots of shallow women out there who judge on appearance alone. Not only do they assign value to guys based on appearance, they also value themselves based on appearance: they're the ones who are blond (and weren't born that way), and thin, who carefully apply their makeup and style their hair multiple times a day, and who wear high heels, miniskirts, leggings, and other eye candy. And you know what? They get rewarded for this behavior with attention, not just from the guys they are trying to attract, but from all the rest as well. Yes, they will often reject you: but are they Everywoman? Hardly! They might be the only ones you noticed, but they're not the only women there are.
What about the girls who have intelligence and personality but not the looks? In the hell that is high school (where our ideas about this kind of thing are usually formed), those girls often don't even have an alternate identity of "geek" to fall back on--they're just the ugly girls, the fat girls, the social rejects and misfits. And they experience the exact same rejection from guys, including most of the geeks, that you describe receiving from girls. Maybe y'all should look around for the girls who don't fit the artificial standard of desirability. They're the ones in the band, or in the computer room; they're doing things instead of being ornamental, so they might be harder to find; and they may not look like much (for one thing, they know mobility is more important than sexy shoes) but they can speak, and listen (which is a lot more important), and they know what it's like to be rejected based on stupid assumptions that beautiful=good and !beautiful=!good.
Jenny, who is surprised how angry she still is about this fifteen years after high school
Captain Keen said: Who is responsible for determining what is "safe" for kids to view and what is not? Apparantly the Government has ideas in that area.
Or at least certain members of Congress do. Please don't confuse the federal bureaucracy with the Reps and Senators who have to make a name for themselves to assure their reelection: the two groups are often at odds over what the agencies should be doing. This is one reason budget bills take so long to pass: they are the most powerful tool Congress has to micromanage agency business (although summoning agency heads to hearings is another popular approach) and when one group in Congress wants to order certain actions, like increased timber sales or granting export licenses to a particular company, there's usually another group that will fight hard to make sure those actions don't make it into the final version of the budget.
There isn't a single federal agency that wants to get into the business of deciding what people can and can't say online: they know it's not only a no-win situation (because people's standards and tolerances vary) but also contrary to the 1st Amendment. But members of Congress have no compunctions about advocating positions that they think will get them votes, even if they are clearly illegal: when I was a fed, our agency once received direct instructions in our appropriation bill to spend money in a way that violated federal law. Congressfolk pander to groups that can promise them votes, and socially conservative groups promise that waving the banner of "child protection" will bring in the votes.
If the government made cars, a Chevy would cost $80,000 and you would have to refill the gas tank every 10 blocks.
This is a cute phrase, but do you have any evidence to back it up? Some vehicles actually made by governments: the East German Trabant--badly unreliable but dirt cheap, reasonably good gas mileage because gas was, and is, so expensive in Europe; the HumVee--really pretty reliable, can handle terrain that your Ford Explorer can't but costs some $150K and gets, I believe, similar gas mileage to passenger cars; the original Jeep--reliable, cheap, I don't know its gas mileage off hand but I know there weren't gas stations every 10 blocks in the jungles where they went. Some expensive, some not, none as fuel-inefficient as you claim.
I do not recall anything in the constitution delegating censorship or ratings to the Federal government, and I seem to recall something about all unlisted powers being sent to the state, in which case regulations are at the wrong level.
You're right about censorship not being a delegated federal power, but that hasn't kept the government from exercising it. One of the first laws passed by the first Congress was the Sedition Act, which made speaking against the government, in voice or in print, an act of treason punishable by death. And some people were actually executed for it while the Revolutionary War was still going on. The Supreme Court later struck this one down as contrary to the First Amendment, but not until a few decades later (!) As to unlisted responsibilities, you're thinking of the Reserved Powers clause (near the end of the Constitution), which does indeed say that any powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. But regulation of interstate commerce is one power specifically reserved to the federal government (in an earlier clause) and since the telephone system was ruled as interstate commerce the Internet is considered the same. You wouldn't want state-by-state regulation of the Internet: that could cause foolishnes like not being able to send email to Kansas advocating the theory of evolution. Of course federal regulation could be just as bad, but then the 1st Amendment-based lawsuits to overturn stupid laws only have to be filed once instead of 50 times.
Jenny
Sounds like you subscribe to the "good enemy" concept--you know, a good enemy is one you have to stretch to your limits to beat. The problem seems to be that Microsoft can't be beaten by playing fair, i.e. competing on the merits of the product. This is because Microsoft DOESN'T compete strictly on the merits of their product (how could they?), and the kinds of "cheating" they engage in really make the most of their company's other advantages: they have the resources to seriously influence buying patterns through FUD and "creative benchmarking", they have the bucks to acquire competing technologies so they can incorporate or eliminate them, and they have the market clout to set defacto standards or to "embrace and extend", i.e. subvert, negotiated standards, as the Halloween documents revealed.
Against these fairly awesome forces, the open-source community has what? Good sense (individually), good processes (generally), great code, and personal motivation. These are important things, but they noticeably don't include good marketing, solid representation in standards-creating bodies, and political clout. Yes, I said political clout: Microsoft would have been slapped down hard years ago if another organization with serious pull had gone after all the legal wrongs they've done.
I agree that the open source seems to need something to rally against, but I don't think the Evil Empire is exactly it: open source began because people wanted code that was good, and free. So what they're rallying against is code that is bad, and/or expensive (and closed-source). Microsoft is a putrid example of all these things, and as the largest such example is an easy target, but if Bill Gates had stayed at Harvard and become a lawyer or something there would still be bad expensive code out there, and I believe the open source community would be just as fervently creating alternatives to it. In fact, I think the open source community will be continually pushed to better things as long as they remain the underdogs: almost any individual company could fill the "good enemy" role. If open source "wins", and closed source becomes the anomaly instead of the rule, then I think the community would struggle to redefine itself. But I don't see that happening soon, and breaking up Microsoft won't bring this about all by itself.
Jenny
Remande said: The Constitution give the people the right to free speech. Microsoft is not a "people", it is a corporation. ...the company no longer is an extension of the person but becomes its own legal entity (though not a person).
All true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately for the rights of actual people in the US, the court system began extending the free-speech provisions in the Constitution to corporations several years back. Some odd things can grow out of this precedent. For example, one of the lawsuits over campaign finance reform resulted in a ruling that restricting campaign contributions unfairly limited people's right to free expression (though not speech per se), in that supporting a political party is a form of expressing your opinion. This doctrine has been called "One dollar, one vote," and consider this: if corporations have the same rights to free expression as people, then according to this doctrine a corporation could contribute millions to a party. Well guess what? They do exactly that--we have the best system money can buy! So even though corporations are not people, they are allowed some of the same rights as people, and worse yet they have far more funding with which to take advantage of those rights.
It has been said that freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one: freedom of speech belongs to all but is a lot more significant for the person who owns a bullhorn. And Microsoft can afford a lot more bullhorns than any of us--indeed, in this article we see them buying bullhorns for others to use in their behalf. This legal precedent needs to be abolished, and the sooner the better. Corporations already have more protections than people, and just in the interest of balance they shouldn't have all our rights and privileges too.
Jenny
We're already two species. There's the homo informaticus to which all reading this belong, and the old homo sapiens that isn't at all sapient to how we are changing it's world.
Sorry, you fail the biology exam. Behavior and knowledge (which is the only difference you describe between your "species") are part of culture, NOT biology. That means that an individual from the tech-ignorant group could, with sufficient education, become a member of the tech-enabled group. No amount of education will turn Washoe into a human, by comparison.
The old species is already nomadic, living hand-to-mouth and at odds with nature.
Got news for you: we tech-enabled bunch are even more at odds with nature. Or did you think that our consumption of tantalum capacitors for cell phones and petroleum to make PalmPilot cases is somehow sustainable? And nomadic? Tuaregs and Australian aborigines are nomadic. Homeless people in the US are sometimes nomadic, but more often they stick to a given territory. The rest of us (some 230 million plus) are definitely not, but I'm sure you don't think all those 230MM are part of homo informaticus. Don't let your enthusiasm for your point inflate your rhetoric beyond all reason.
The new species has been able to avoid the dismal lifestyle of the old through it's fusion with technology.
Maybe YOU have an interface implant behind your ear, but nobody I know does (and I'm sure some of my coworkers would get them if they could). We have adopted technology into our lives, but fusion is considerably more advanced than that: it implies creating a link that can never be dissolved. Pacemakers qualify: PDAs don't.
The fact that we have embraced technology, and evolved thereby, was a willful, convenience driven event. We are dependent on our technology as much as birds are dependent on their ability to fly. To un-plug means death. We may not be left biologically dead without our tech, but our lifestyle, our standard of living, would end. Is that no death?
Ask this question of someone with a gun to their head, or with a terminal disease slowly eroding their body. Or of a bird that relies on its wings to escape from all the other bird-eating life forms out there. If adoption of technology was a convenience-driven event and not a survival-driven one, then by your own words loss of those "conveniences" does not threaten survival. And I doubt that even you would say "Give me my lifestyle or give me death!" Most of us value our lives over our lifestyles.