1) The Crusades were a response to the Islamic Jihad that conquered 50% of the Christian lands and forced them to convert to Islam. All of North Africa and most of the Middle East was Christian before the first jihad.
2) The Spanish Inquisition was instigated and run by the Spanish government, not the church. The Pope was blackmailed into starting it, opposed it, and had no control over it. Ironically, the Spanish Inquisition never targeted people who openly professed non-Christian religions. It only targeted people who professed Catholicism, but practiced a different religion.
3) The Jewish Blood Libel is a function of European anti-semitism.
4) Many of these groups were at war with Christian nations. Until a few centuries ago, it was accepted around the world that conquered peoples had no such rights, and Muslims have been far, far more brutal than Christians in this respect. Ever wonder why Zoroastrianism is so small it makes Judaism look like a major world religion?
5) Abortion clinic bombings are carried out by a minority of anti-abortion activists. Furthermore, while most Christians regard abortion as murder, they also are willing to cooperate with the government to stop those who commit murder to stop abortion.
You, my deluded friend, need to stop repeating the same old, tired bullshit propaganda. Maybe if you knew something about history, you would know that more Christians died in the Spanish Red Terror than in the Spanish Inquisition (nearly 7,000 for the former, nearly 2,000 for the latter which lasted about 300 years!)
Have already bought all of the fake IDs that they need to do their jobs because they are well-trained and financed. Nothing done here would capture the caliber of terrorists capable of actually pulling off another 9-11. All of the original 9-11 terrorists had their IDs in order.
If you are listening to violent, misogynistic garbage like most gangsta rap while you are going about your day, you are just feeding yourself a steady stream of crap. It's not entirely unlike propaganda in that respect, since it is ambient information that just keeps hitting you, hitting you, hitting you. Since it is passive, not active, your brain is probably not actively engaging and analyzing the input the way it would with a book or video game.
I'm about as libertarian as they come. Some of my positions are damn near scary to others because I believe that people have a right to screw up their own lives. However, I'm also not blind to the fact that things like pornography and violent, depraved music are psychologically harmful when regularly consumed. I've known friends who are hopelessly addicted to porn, for example. IMO, the reverend is probably not far off when he blames violent and sexual media for some of his congregation's recurring problems.
Granted, as a Christian, and a liberal calvinist, I would remind the good reverend what the "T" in TULIP stands for: Total Depravity. As my pastor has said before, if you want to slow down and maybe mostly stop sin in your life, don't fight the sin. Come to Jesus instead; when your focus is on Jesus, your focus won't be on sin.
Until intellectual property law is forced to conform to the same expectations that private property has, it will never have universal legitimacy in the culture the way that physical property has (except with thieves and Socialists; I repeat myself...)
A modest proposal:
1) Outlaw implied contracts. When I buy a movie, CD, program, etc., unless I sign something in writing, prior to the purchase, any "contract" should be null and void, and any effort to enforce it should be criminal activity.
2) Copyright infringement by sharing copyrighted data is treated as theft, with goods valued for the purpose of assessment under existing property laws at current market value. Copyright infringement by accident, like posting a single picture you weren't supposed to on your site is not a crime at all or at the worst gets you a slap on the wrist.
3) Copyright holders cannot restrict how any one copy of their work is used by buyers, except to make them respect the artificial scarcity of copyright law. Meaning, if I want to resell iPhones with jail-broken OSs and tons of apps, Apple cannot legally interfere with my customers' enjoyment of their iPhone and its OS anymore than Honda could interfere with my customers if I were selling modified racing civics (except to cut off their warranty).
Make banks have to verify your identity before they can create ANY new account in your name, and make all such institutions, from banks, to data mining companies, liable for the damage they cause to private citizens through not taking adequate means to protect the data they have on us. The down side to this sort of approach is that it would probably cause a wave of depression-like effects on the banking industry because it would be so difficult to sign people up for credit accounts. However, in the long run, it would be 100% worth the short-term pain.
Is that it gives the government even less excuse to use no-knock raids for crimes that could easily be handled by regular police work. Take the case of Ryan Frederick, for example. The police created a situation where they ended up losing an officer after they attacked the house of a suspected drug dealer (who shows all signs so far of being completely innocent). Had the police gotten his cell phone information and mapped his daily routine, they could have discretely caught him by surprise in a public place, taken him in for questioning, and the only one going to jail would have been the police informant who lied his ass off and victimized both sides. This cell phone tracking actually gives civil libertarians an argument as to why these raids cannot possibly be justified in most cases because the police can figure out where the person is going, and ambush them when they have the advantage (something they don't have when assaulting a home).
The very reason that companies like Google have been told that they are "freeloaders" by the telecoms and ISPs is because the access providers wouldn't point their fingers at their own policies and customers. Unlimited broadband is ridiculous at this stage of the game. There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom because it gives us a greater argument for demanding a hands-off approach to regulating protocols. If you pay for the bandwidth itself, rather than just a simple monthly access fee, it's easier to argue that it's your bandwidth now and the ISP needs to piss off if they think they'll tell you how to use it, the law notwithstanding.
Murder is wrong. Get your theology right. The Bible only condemns homicide, not killing in self-defense, in defense of another or in times of war. In fact Jesus said that calamities like war and social problems like poverty would continue to happen as they always have until the time that God returns to take back control of the Earth directly from Satan (and humanity).
Let's see... they tied their fortunes to a pretty unpopular company, AT&T, in exchange for kickbacks and didn't even try to get Verizon, the largest mobile phone service, to sell a version of their phone.
Genius, I tell you. Genius.
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
If I were worried about bandwidth, why wouldn't I just use one of the packed down files? They're as small, if not smaller, than most of the images that will appear on a web page.
No doubt, part of the problem it has with piracy comes from the way that software isn't held to the same expectations as physical property, adjusted for the ability to copy it. If I buy a copy of Autocad, I should be able to sell my one copy of it. I can do that with anything else in my home. Why should software be exempted from this social and legal convention of property use?
Just execute people who produce it for profit on their first offense.
Stop. Don't pass go. Firing squad.
Get Thailand and few of the other offending countries in on it.
If you think I'm being inhumane by suggesting execution, then please explain how living life as a social leper is any less inhumane or exposing them to the general prison population for life isn't basically asking for them to be raped repeatedly and murdered. See, from where I'm standing, people who joke about prison rape and murder don't exactly have moral standing to say that a clean execution is inhumane.
As to why I said "for profit," it's because they'll never take things like two teens making a sex tape off the books as a serious felony. I don't want to give them license to execute teens for getting it on.
If people get used to seeing "The Republic of Taiwan" instead of the "Shitty, Upstart Province of Formosa (or China's name for it) that Dares Act Independent," then that would give people the expectation that Taiwan is a sovereign country. If China goes to war, then it's not to reclaim a break-away province that has been acting like a renegade, but rather just another conquest like Iraq on Kuwait.
Maps do have real political value behind them. There are a lot of people in Mexico that would love to see the reconquista of the Southwest, and the Mexican government has said in the past that expanding its territory back into the original territory is its goal. That's actually why the map that Absolut did in their advertising campaign was so controversial in the U.S.
If it is too good to be true, then it probably is. If this becomes a real problem over there for our troops you can bet that the military is going to start cracking down on the troops for copyright infringement or something like that to persuade them to not buy these bootlegs and risk the military's networks.
I saw a post on the blog Technology Liberation Front that pointed out that most of their ideas don't pan out. They just don't even work. You know what many of those "inventors" sound like?
The same sort of person who would fit in well with "social scientists." It's great that you are smart and have ideas, but I could give a shit less about your "ideas" if you cannot make a functioning prototype of them.
Our society should have precious little tolerance for people who only come up with ideas on paper, without being able to put them into practice.
is that they may put threading problems beyond the control of the developer. What happens when your language environment has bugs in how it generates and manages threads? How much control would you have over what is being done behind the scenes? For that reason alone, I think it would be better to keep the use of threads purely optional, preferably as part of a library, rather than put into the core language itself as a series of features and keywords.
This sounds like a very simple and stupid way to run afoul of the federal anti-hacking laws. They prohibit you from using surreptitious means of gaining access to a network that you otherwise shouldn't have access to. That sounds like what you would be doing here. While the odds of you getting caught are pretty slim, it would probably be a pretty easy case for the government to take, and with prosecutors always looking for another notch in their belt, why risk it?
They can seize all of your assets by claiming that they were involved in a crime. Then, suddenly, your "due process" rights are defended by a public defender because you are dirt poor. "Due process" on property rights was largely destroyed because of the asset forfeiture laws and a bunch of motherfucking judicial scumbags who like to split hairs about issues like whether or not it is really a violation of your constitutional rights to allow the police to "charge your property" with a crime instead of charging **you** with a crime.
The courts are not going to agree that it is constitutionally problematic that they cannot comply due to reasonable manpower issues. "Change your business model if you can't screen what you sell" is going to be the likely response from even a liberal court.
I just don't see what Dark Horse's excuse is. They publish comics. There is no reason for them to not be painfully aware of what's in everything they sell, and to sell it accordingly.
MADD has frequently championed limit after limit after limit on drinking rights. That's why, quite frankly, I could care less what they have to say because they've used up all of their political capital between advancing authoritarian laws and practices, and acting like having lost a child gives you some sort of "moral credibility or authority" on drunk driving.
I think the average GTA player realizes that pretty much nothing in GTA is something they should emulate in real life. Considering the consequences for drunk driving in many jurisdictions, this is just shameless self-promotion on MADD's part.
It would behoove people to leave their computers off overnight unless they have a compelling reason for leaving them on. Not only does it waste electricity, it also enables many computers to be used as spambots. If instead of banning incandescent light bulbs, Congress had told the American people to turn off their computers overnight, we would have been able to take out two birds with one stone.
Who sees that this could become a huge regulatory nightmare in the coming years for software developers? This will only be effective so long as either the public continues using mainstream protocols for most activities, and the protocols that the FBI wants to monitor don't get changed or replaced on a regular basis by those who don't want to be monitored. The eventual outcome, IMO, besides the obvious privacy, constitutional and financial issues involved in this would be a bridge between this mandate, the data retention mandate and CALEA causing all providers of IT products to comply to make their products easy for law enforcement to monitory, going so far as to outlaw the deployment of software that is capable of evading surveillance.
No institution other than one that can compel funding and compliance could ever operate with the sort of gross incompetence and lack of priorities that government frequently has. A few obvious examples:
1) The Bush Administration has $500B to spend on prescription pills for the elderly, but cannot find $100M to fund 10,000 new border patrol agents on the southern border.
2) New Orleans had plenty of money to waste on welfare programs and such, but didn't have any money to spend on getting its own fixes for the levies, even if they were only gradual repair contracts.
3) All of the pork barrel spending that goes on in Congress.
4) The congressional hearings over steroid use in professional sports. I don't agree that it is the state's business at all, but isn't this what we have the DEA for?
5) Doing things like setting up honeypots to catch people who might have a passing interest in child porn when there are still people getting away with the actual production of the same in U.S. territory, child molesters and Americans flying overseas to do the same.
6) Passing and enforcing drug laws when there isn't even enough room due to the War on Drugs to guarantee that someone who commits 1st degree murder will get life in prison. Same thing for how the WoD has made it much easier to argue that the system just cannot handle the burden of locking up dangerous criminals permanently.
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1) The Crusades were a response to the Islamic Jihad that conquered 50% of the Christian lands and forced them to convert to Islam. All of North Africa and most of the Middle East was Christian before the first jihad.
2) The Spanish Inquisition was instigated and run by the Spanish government, not the church. The Pope was blackmailed into starting it, opposed it, and had no control over it. Ironically, the Spanish Inquisition never targeted people who openly professed non-Christian religions. It only targeted people who professed Catholicism, but practiced a different religion.
3) The Jewish Blood Libel is a function of European anti-semitism.
4) Many of these groups were at war with Christian nations. Until a few centuries ago, it was accepted around the world that conquered peoples had no such rights, and Muslims have been far, far more brutal than Christians in this respect. Ever wonder why Zoroastrianism is so small it makes Judaism look like a major world religion?
5) Abortion clinic bombings are carried out by a minority of anti-abortion activists. Furthermore, while most Christians regard abortion as murder, they also are willing to cooperate with the government to stop those who commit murder to stop abortion.
You, my deluded friend, need to stop repeating the same old, tired bullshit propaganda. Maybe if you knew something about history, you would know that more Christians died in the Spanish Red Terror than in the Spanish Inquisition (nearly 7,000 for the former, nearly 2,000 for the latter which lasted about 300 years!)
Have already bought all of the fake IDs that they need to do their jobs because they are well-trained and financed. Nothing done here would capture the caliber of terrorists capable of actually pulling off another 9-11. All of the original 9-11 terrorists had their IDs in order.
If you are listening to violent, misogynistic garbage like most gangsta rap while you are going about your day, you are just feeding yourself a steady stream of crap. It's not entirely unlike propaganda in that respect, since it is ambient information that just keeps hitting you, hitting you, hitting you. Since it is passive, not active, your brain is probably not actively engaging and analyzing the input the way it would with a book or video game.
I'm about as libertarian as they come. Some of my positions are damn near scary to others because I believe that people have a right to screw up their own lives. However, I'm also not blind to the fact that things like pornography and violent, depraved music are psychologically harmful when regularly consumed. I've known friends who are hopelessly addicted to porn, for example. IMO, the reverend is probably not far off when he blames violent and sexual media for some of his congregation's recurring problems.
Granted, as a Christian, and a liberal calvinist, I would remind the good reverend what the "T" in TULIP stands for: Total Depravity. As my pastor has said before, if you want to slow down and maybe mostly stop sin in your life, don't fight the sin. Come to Jesus instead; when your focus is on Jesus, your focus won't be on sin.
Until intellectual property law is forced to conform to the same expectations that private property has, it will never have universal legitimacy in the culture the way that physical property has (except with thieves and Socialists; I repeat myself...)
A modest proposal:
1) Outlaw implied contracts. When I buy a movie, CD, program, etc., unless I sign something in writing, prior to the purchase, any "contract" should be null and void, and any effort to enforce it should be criminal activity.
2) Copyright infringement by sharing copyrighted data is treated as theft, with goods valued for the purpose of assessment under existing property laws at current market value. Copyright infringement by accident, like posting a single picture you weren't supposed to on your site is not a crime at all or at the worst gets you a slap on the wrist.
3) Copyright holders cannot restrict how any one copy of their work is used by buyers, except to make them respect the artificial scarcity of copyright law. Meaning, if I want to resell iPhones with jail-broken OSs and tons of apps, Apple cannot legally interfere with my customers' enjoyment of their iPhone and its OS anymore than Honda could interfere with my customers if I were selling modified racing civics (except to cut off their warranty).
Make banks have to verify your identity before they can create ANY new account in your name, and make all such institutions, from banks, to data mining companies, liable for the damage they cause to private citizens through not taking adequate means to protect the data they have on us. The down side to this sort of approach is that it would probably cause a wave of depression-like effects on the banking industry because it would be so difficult to sign people up for credit accounts. However, in the long run, it would be 100% worth the short-term pain.
Is that it gives the government even less excuse to use no-knock raids for crimes that could easily be handled by regular police work. Take the case of Ryan Frederick, for example. The police created a situation where they ended up losing an officer after they attacked the house of a suspected drug dealer (who shows all signs so far of being completely innocent). Had the police gotten his cell phone information and mapped his daily routine, they could have discretely caught him by surprise in a public place, taken him in for questioning, and the only one going to jail would have been the police informant who lied his ass off and victimized both sides. This cell phone tracking actually gives civil libertarians an argument as to why these raids cannot possibly be justified in most cases because the police can figure out where the person is going, and ambush them when they have the advantage (something they don't have when assaulting a home).
The very reason that companies like Google have been told that they are "freeloaders" by the telecoms and ISPs is because the access providers wouldn't point their fingers at their own policies and customers. Unlimited broadband is ridiculous at this stage of the game. There simply is not enough infrastructure to allow everyone to consume whatever they want, whenever they want, without making them pay for it.
The fact is, metered bandwidth is good for our own freedom because it gives us a greater argument for demanding a hands-off approach to regulating protocols. If you pay for the bandwidth itself, rather than just a simple monthly access fee, it's easier to argue that it's your bandwidth now and the ISP needs to piss off if they think they'll tell you how to use it, the law notwithstanding.
Murder is wrong. Get your theology right. The Bible only condemns homicide, not killing in self-defense, in defense of another or in times of war. In fact Jesus said that calamities like war and social problems like poverty would continue to happen as they always have until the time that God returns to take back control of the Earth directly from Satan (and humanity).
Read this if you don't believe me.
I used to think the Eee PC was a great idea until I actually tried to type on a 7" model at Best Buy.
Absolutely horrendous keyboard! Too small and cramped for me to be able to stand there and type out a few sentences at normal speed.
For me, the best portable I've seen is the old 12" PowerBook G4. It was light and small, but had a fully usable keyboard.
Let's see... they tied their fortunes to a pretty unpopular company, AT&T, in exchange for kickbacks and didn't even try to get Verizon, the largest mobile phone service, to sell a version of their phone.
Genius, I tell you. Genius.
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
If I were worried about bandwidth, why wouldn't I just use one of the packed down files? They're as small, if not smaller, than most of the images that will appear on a web page.
No doubt, part of the problem it has with piracy comes from the way that software isn't held to the same expectations as physical property, adjusted for the ability to copy it. If I buy a copy of Autocad, I should be able to sell my one copy of it. I can do that with anything else in my home. Why should software be exempted from this social and legal convention of property use?
Just execute people who produce it for profit on their first offense.
Stop.
Don't pass go.
Firing squad.
Get Thailand and few of the other offending countries in on it.
If you think I'm being inhumane by suggesting execution, then please explain how living life as a social leper is any less inhumane or exposing them to the general prison population for life isn't basically asking for them to be raped repeatedly and murdered. See, from where I'm standing, people who joke about prison rape and murder don't exactly have moral standing to say that a clean execution is inhumane.
As to why I said "for profit," it's because they'll never take things like two teens making a sex tape off the books as a serious felony. I don't want to give them license to execute teens for getting it on.
If people get used to seeing "The Republic of Taiwan" instead of the "Shitty, Upstart Province of Formosa (or China's name for it) that Dares Act Independent," then that would give people the expectation that Taiwan is a sovereign country. If China goes to war, then it's not to reclaim a break-away province that has been acting like a renegade, but rather just another conquest like Iraq on Kuwait.
Maps do have real political value behind them. There are a lot of people in Mexico that would love to see the reconquista of the Southwest, and the Mexican government has said in the past that expanding its territory back into the original territory is its goal. That's actually why the map that Absolut did in their advertising campaign was so controversial in the U.S.
If it is too good to be true, then it probably is. If this becomes a real problem over there for our troops you can bet that the military is going to start cracking down on the troops for copyright infringement or something like that to persuade them to not buy these bootlegs and risk the military's networks.
I saw a post on the blog Technology Liberation Front that pointed out that most of their ideas don't pan out. They just don't even work. You know what many of those "inventors" sound like?
The same sort of person who would fit in well with "social scientists." It's great that you are smart and have ideas, but I could give a shit less about your "ideas" if you cannot make a functioning prototype of them.
Our society should have precious little tolerance for people who only come up with ideas on paper, without being able to put them into practice.
is that they may put threading problems beyond the control of the developer. What happens when your language environment has bugs in how it generates and manages threads? How much control would you have over what is being done behind the scenes? For that reason alone, I think it would be better to keep the use of threads purely optional, preferably as part of a library, rather than put into the core language itself as a series of features and keywords.
This sounds like a very simple and stupid way to run afoul of the federal anti-hacking laws. They prohibit you from using surreptitious means of gaining access to a network that you otherwise shouldn't have access to. That sounds like what you would be doing here. While the odds of you getting caught are pretty slim, it would probably be a pretty easy case for the government to take, and with prosecutors always looking for another notch in their belt, why risk it?
Since when are resellers classified as an official presence by the vendor inside a state?
They can seize all of your assets by claiming that they were involved in a crime. Then, suddenly, your "due process" rights are defended by a public defender because you are dirt poor. "Due process" on property rights was largely destroyed because of the asset forfeiture laws and a bunch of motherfucking judicial scumbags who like to split hairs about issues like whether or not it is really a violation of your constitutional rights to allow the police to "charge your property" with a crime instead of charging **you** with a crime.
The courts are not going to agree that it is constitutionally problematic that they cannot comply due to reasonable manpower issues. "Change your business model if you can't screen what you sell" is going to be the likely response from even a liberal court.
I just don't see what Dark Horse's excuse is. They publish comics. There is no reason for them to not be painfully aware of what's in everything they sell, and to sell it accordingly.
MADD has frequently championed limit after limit after limit on drinking rights. That's why, quite frankly, I could care less what they have to say because they've used up all of their political capital between advancing authoritarian laws and practices, and acting like having lost a child gives you some sort of "moral credibility or authority" on drunk driving.
I think the average GTA player realizes that pretty much nothing in GTA is something they should emulate in real life. Considering the consequences for drunk driving in many jurisdictions, this is just shameless self-promotion on MADD's part.
It would behoove people to leave their computers off overnight unless they have a compelling reason for leaving them on. Not only does it waste electricity, it also enables many computers to be used as spambots. If instead of banning incandescent light bulbs, Congress had told the American people to turn off their computers overnight, we would have been able to take out two birds with one stone.
Who sees that this could become a huge regulatory nightmare in the coming years for software developers? This will only be effective so long as either the public continues using mainstream protocols for most activities, and the protocols that the FBI wants to monitor don't get changed or replaced on a regular basis by those who don't want to be monitored. The eventual outcome, IMO, besides the obvious privacy, constitutional and financial issues involved in this would be a bridge between this mandate, the data retention mandate and CALEA causing all providers of IT products to comply to make their products easy for law enforcement to monitory, going so far as to outlaw the deployment of software that is capable of evading surveillance.
No institution other than one that can compel funding and compliance could ever operate with the sort of gross incompetence and lack of priorities that government frequently has. A few obvious examples:
1) The Bush Administration has $500B to spend on prescription pills for the elderly, but cannot find $100M to fund 10,000 new border patrol agents on the southern border.
2) New Orleans had plenty of money to waste on welfare programs and such, but didn't have any money to spend on getting its own fixes for the levies, even if they were only gradual repair contracts.
3) All of the pork barrel spending that goes on in Congress.
4) The congressional hearings over steroid use in professional sports. I don't agree that it is the state's business at all, but isn't this what we have the DEA for?
5) Doing things like setting up honeypots to catch people who might have a passing interest in child porn when there are still people getting away with the actual production of the same in U.S. territory, child molesters and Americans flying overseas to do the same.
6) Passing and enforcing drug laws when there isn't even enough room due to the War on Drugs to guarantee that someone who commits 1st degree murder will get life in prison. Same thing for how the WoD has made it much easier to argue that the system just cannot handle the burden of locking up dangerous criminals permanently.