Despite the population density, I'm not sure the Chinese people are really mobile enough to really get wiped out by an airborne epidemic.
Most of China is still regional and so insular that different towns have their own take on the Chinese language. You might be able to take out the major cities, which would really screw the country over in terms of destroying its intellectual capital. But as long as it still had its physical industry, I think it'd recover.
I think if the US has half a brain it will invest in nuclear energy and wind power. Travel will be expensive, but we'll still have electricity.
But remember - we're special because "We're Americans."
At the moment, we are. Our money is the international standard (till the Euro takes off) our language is the international standard. Our culture, or what passes for it, is exported to the ends of the earth. Heck, few other countries are quite as unified as we are in terms of both size internal resources, common language.
If you're suggesting that right-wing militia and McVeigh's blowing up a building was "mass murder" while Al Queda's blowing up the WTC was "war" I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
I'm not arguing one way or another. I'm just wondering how much support one nation has to give a group of foriegn rebels before that supporting nation should be considered as having declared war.
Does the Taliban's support of Bin Ladin and their sympathy for him mean that they're responsible for his actions? During the cold war, we were trying to avoid a 'hot war' with Russia so we confined ourselves to proxy wars. But when another nation without nukes gives rebels aid and comfort on its soil, and the rebels attack America it seems Washington wants to be able to go after the source.
And yes, this isn't 'fair.' Just like it isn't 'fair' that some nations can have nukes and others can't. I don't think fair is what the US is going for.
Yes, and it used to be believed that if you knew the name of a God then you had power over them. i.e. Odin knew the name of all the Gods, which was significant in terms of power relationships.
The Jewish people refused to invoke God's name in this manner, and didn't speak it. Some orthodox Jews use the hebrew phrase "HaShem," literally "the name" to refer to God. Or they say "AdoShem" instead of "Adonoi." etc.
I was secularizing the principle a bit; i.e. you don't use the power of invoking God's name to gain temporal wealth, power, stature, etc.
"The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of fourteen years; but the benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
"Inventions... cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:334
"The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me:... Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding __ years, but for no longer term and for no other purpose." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:451, Papers 15:368
"In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent-right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:356
"Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807. ME 11:201
"No sentiment is more acknowledged in the family of Agriculturists than that the few who can afford it should incur the risk and expense of all new improvements, and give the benefit freely to the many of more restricted circumstances." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1810. ME 12:389
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jef f1320.htm... It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the pos
Saying that the Republican party is a wing of any religion is an insult to that religion.
Republicans use religion as a stepping stone to gain office, but that ignores the commandment against using the Lord's name in vain, which seems to be the most misunderstood commandment. People seem to think it has somthing to do with not saying "goddamnit" which would have been relevant back when people thought that they could actually invoke the name of a god to curse other people.
In other words, you're breaking a commandment if you use the name of God to further your own selfish interests.
I think the reason for the rapid tech advances during WWII was the fact that we were at war and necessity is the mother of invention. Same for the Germans.
In a normal market where commodities are manufactured, research is hard to fund. It's been monopolies like Bell Labs and the National Gov't which have really pushed things forward because they had both the cash and the desire to do so.
1984 was pretty dead on. The govt funds science and technology because we need to compete with other nations economically and ultimately, millitarily. It is this threat which forces polititians to rely on science rather than simply make up and propagate their own facts. The government doesn't fund science because it wants to cure cancer or diabetes or help us understand the universe. It does it mostly so that we stay strong as a nation and can defend ourselves. A society which turned away from science and technology would eventually fail to defend itself. All research is supposed to support American industry or the American millitary.
Perhaps the researchers should apply for weapons grants, stating that the technology they develop will be able to help countless soldiers on and off the battlefield, returning them to war quicker than ever before. That'd probably stur the couldron a bit.
At the end of the day, unfortunately, that's the whole idea. If you don't believe me, check out the justifications for the Baye- Dole act and technology transfer acts to see what polititians thing the role of science should be now that the cold war is over.
The Baye-Dole Act of 1980 is significant, he explains, because it allowed ownership of federally-sponsored inventions to be taken from the public, and sold to corporations. "Before, if the feds invested in university research, the assumption was, whatever product was invented belonged to the people of the United States-the taxpayer pays, the taxpayer gets a result." Now, says Minsky, the product of a federally-funded project can be sold by a university to a private corporation "which then owns a product produced by taxpayer money, to be sold back to the taxpayer, at any amount they decide." http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archives/cov_stories_2 001/cov_08162001.html
No, we're not. This is the thing that "Human-at-conception" camp, which refers to itself as "pro-life" constantly ignores, no matter how many times it's brought up. All human cells do not have rights. Only individuals have rights. Embryonic stem cells are not individuals for a variety of reasons.
Those who want to assert that life begins at conception frequently fall back on logic that flies in the face of longstanding legal precedent. They say embryos are human, for example, because they represent a unique set of human DNA. But if this definition of what is human were true, it would be okay to kill a twin as long as the other twin remained. It's not. A human is more than simply a set of cells with unique DNA. And we've recognized that for thousands of years. The set of cells must also pass a certain stage of development. Otherwise, any stem cell which could potentially be cloned through somatic cell transfer would be human.
While many socieites differed radicially from ours in terms of their legal code, and assigned rights to a patriarch, a family, or a nation, our society assigns rights primarily to individual human beings.
Cells don't have rights until they become individuals. An individual is one person, and one person only. Never two or three or possibly four people. An individual is only one person. An embryonic stem cell is one or two or possibly three people, or none at all if it doesn't attach to the uterine wall.
Likewise, the often repeated canard of 'what if you were aborted doesn't support those who say people are humans at conception unless you also don't believe in contraception, or any other act which would prevent the birth of a person. After all, if my parents had gone to the movies instead of making me, I wouldn't be here either. But what kind of logic is that? This is a case of assuming what you're trying to prove. People who don't believe than individuality starts at conception will never be persuaded by this argument, because they don't believe that they were 'them' at conception. They believe they were still a 'pre-individual.'
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you. Strange how the "human" dividing line moves so.
Moving? Are you claiming that he's applying one standard to himself, and another standard to other people. If so, I really don't think you understand his argument. But if you're saying that there are a lot of people who disagree with you and hold different moral standards which they apply to all people then yes, you're absolutely right.
Polititians still respond to the public on issues that the public is interested in. They listen to lobbies when they can't hear anyone else talking.
I'm basing this on a few friends who have volunteered at various political establishments.
Granted, they still lie like rugs ("We're looking into it", etc.)
Lobbies are effective because they can't be easily fooled and follow up. You can have grass roots lobbies. Look at the NRA. People call it the "Gun Lobby" but it has power because it has a lot of grass roots support.
A private company can buy out its competitors or drive them out of business. This happens a lot with software companies, even more so than in other industries. FOSS software can't be bought out or forced out of business. Because of this, FOSS software can prevent companies from gaining and abusing a monopoly position. Because FOSS is free, it keeps commercial software companies from charging too much, because people can always go to the cheaper competition. (assuming they don't just pirate the commercial software)
In my day we used Prodigy and had to pay for each individual e-mail. It made us consider our words carefully and write deliberately.
In my day, we didn't have fancy tools like Yahoo messenger. If we wanted to be distracted from our work, we had to play minesweeper or flirt with our neighibors. But it prevented us from getting into long distance relationships with flirtatious people we would never meet, gosh darnit.
In my day, we didn't have Google. We had tools like Archie and Gopher. And when we were sick of using those to try and find what we wanted, we asked our neighibors or just looked the darn information up. And sure, it wasn't as good as this newfangled technology they got now. But it was reliable. I tell ya, the dictionary we have has been in our family for over 40 years. It belonged to my grandpappy. And it's never been down, or required rebooting, or been subject to a DDOS attack. Nosirrie. Worst thing that ever happed was little Elsie got Jam on one of the pages and we had to tear it out before it rotted. But noone cares about the meaning of effluvius anyhoo.
I think this whole "one or the other" type of argument is a red herring.
The software industry naturally tends towards 'killer aps' which is a nice way of saying that it tends towards monopoly, even more so than traditional industry does. Being able to design a program once, and then produce millions of copies for profit is just too big an incentive to consolidate. It also makes for an incredible economy of scale, so that small companies have a hard time competing.
Look at Adobe's recent purchase of Macromedia to see which way the industry is going.
It's hard for a startup to compete with a readily established killer ap. Take Photoshop, for instance. If someone said "I'm going to start up a company that tries to do what photoshop does" I wouldn't want to invest my money there, unless it pandered to a special niche market - maybe designing 3D skins.
Competition is vital to keep the cost of proprietary systems reasonable. Also, monopolies have a bad history of abusing their customers.
Because OSS software is the most reliable model for giving sustained competition to programs which would otherwise come to monopolize their industry, open source is a vital suppliment to closed source software. It can't be bought out in the same way a private company can, and its low cost puts some downward pressure on the price of closed source systems.
Vigellanteism [sic] is okay if you can get away with it and noone is physically hurt and no property damaged.
I've heard the same argument for terrorism...
By consistently trying to use absurdly extreme examples, you've made the same mistake in your reply as you did in your previous post.
Terrorism involves actions which are, in themselsevs, crimes. Murder, violence or the threat of these things.
If you don't damage property or people, and don't threaten to do so (in other words if your vigellantism is LEGAL), then it can be used against people like spammers.
There are acceptable ways for people to protest and express their outrage short of employing a legal system which is fundamentally inaccessable to those who can't afford its services.
They're using the latin pluralization because it was originally a latin word. Like bacterium and bacteria rather than bacterias.
Foreign words are usually pluralized by foreign rules till they've been in the language for a certain amount of time. And it's this length of time that's under debate.
I can't the pluralization is supposed to be viri or virii though.
hey didn't invite you to visit the Web site to waste their computer resources. Saying "We were invited, so it's legal" is like saying that being invited to someone's house for dinner makes it 100% okay to show up, shit on the table, punch the other guests in the faces, and then break a few windows on the way out.
These acts are crimes in themselves. Filling out a web form is not.
The point was, replying with a garbage reply is not SPAM because you were invited to the page, explicitly. The spammer was not invited.
If you believe your own arguments, why wouldn't the spam complaints be legal?
The less clear cut their case, the less likely they are to retaliate legally. It would be hard for the government to make absurd business offers by invited parties illegal, no matter how odd the offers are. They can make DDOS attacks stick in court though. Personally, I don't think that replying to spam is illegal in the first place (unless, perhaps, you provide false information), but even if you do break the law, spammers are unlikely to waste money on legal expenses.
Vigellanteism is okay if you can get away with it and noone is physically hurt and no property damaged.
Don't get me wrong, most of them are extremely nice people who are eager to learn about other cultures, however there are some who are incredibly racist, and think that just because they have the largest population on Orkut, that they don't have to follow the rules when it says English Only in a community.
There are Brazillians coming to our chat site? There goes the neighborhood!
Of course, I could springboard from here to legalization arguments, but that would bring me way OT...
I'm all for legalizing online communication, even if it has been proven to be addictive. Sites like PubMed have been proven to have real thereputic value.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the population density, I'm not sure the Chinese people are really mobile enough to really get wiped out by an airborne epidemic.
Most of China is still regional and so insular that different towns have their own take on the Chinese language. You might be able to take out the major cities, which would really screw the country over in terms of destroying its intellectual capital. But as long as it still had its physical industry, I think it'd recover.
I think if the US has half a brain it will invest in nuclear energy and wind power. Travel will be expensive, but we'll still have electricity.
But remember - we're special because "We're Americans."
At the moment, we are. Our money is the international standard (till the Euro takes off) our language is the international standard. Our culture, or what passes for it, is exported to the ends of the earth. Heck, few other countries are quite as unified as we are in terms of both size internal resources, common language.
America does have a unique position, for now.
If you're suggesting that right-wing militia and McVeigh's blowing up a building was "mass murder" while Al Queda's blowing up the WTC was "war" I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
I'm not arguing one way or another. I'm just wondering how much support one nation has to give a group of foriegn rebels before that supporting nation should be considered as having declared war.
Does the Taliban's support of Bin Ladin and their sympathy for him mean that they're responsible for his actions? During the cold war, we were trying to avoid a 'hot war' with Russia so we confined ourselves to proxy wars. But when another nation without nukes gives rebels aid and comfort on its soil, and the rebels attack America it seems Washington wants to be able to go after the source.
And yes, this isn't 'fair.' Just like it isn't 'fair' that some nations can have nukes and others can't. I don't think fair is what the US is going for.
.. this didn't apply to the Jewish diety. Sorry. Didn't finish when I hit submit.
Yes, that's it literally. "You don't take God's name for nothing." "Don't desecrate God's name."
My understanding is that the very idea of "using a name" or doing a thing in God's name was a bit more than what our secular society makes it today.
The people of that time believed that knowing the name of a thing gave you power over it, including gods, and that this didn't apply to the Hebrew.
"7 degrees of separation from Osama Bin Ladin."
I only made up the one about the cute black slaves. You can google the others, or check the links that I provided.
Yes, and it used to be believed that if you knew the name of a God then you had power over them. i.e. Odin knew the name of all the Gods, which was significant in terms of power relationships.
The Jewish people refused to invoke God's name in this manner, and didn't speak it. Some orthodox Jews use the hebrew phrase "HaShem," literally "the name" to refer to God. Or they say "AdoShem" instead of "Adonoi." etc.
I was secularizing the principle a bit; i.e. you don't use the power of invoking God's name to gain temporal wealth, power, stature, etc.
"The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of fourteen years; but the benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
... It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.
"Inventions... cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:334
"The following [addition to the Bill of Rights] would have pleased me:... Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding __ years, but for no longer term and for no other purpose." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:451, Papers 15:368
"In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent-right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:356
"Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson to Oliver Evans, 1807. ME 11:201
"No sentiment is more acknowledged in the family of Agriculturists than that the few who can afford it should incur the risk and expense of all new improvements, and give the benefit freely to the many of more restricted circumstances." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1810. ME 12:389
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jef f1320.htm
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the pos
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state. "
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. "
"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. "
"Any cute black slaves around? My wife is out of town."
Don't encourage Steve Jobs.
P.S. Did you actually remember all the cast members' names, text, etc. or did you google them right now?
The RIAA thinks that I stole music using Kazaa, but it's much more subtle than that...
Saying that the Republican party is a wing of any religion is an insult to that religion.
Republicans use religion as a stepping stone to gain office, but that ignores the commandment against using the Lord's name in vain, which seems to be the most misunderstood commandment. People seem to think it has somthing to do with not saying "goddamnit" which would have been relevant back when people thought that they could actually invoke the name of a god to curse other people.
In other words, you're breaking a commandment if you use the name of God to further your own selfish interests.
I think the reason for the rapid tech advances during WWII was the fact that we were at war and necessity is the mother of invention. Same for the Germans.
2 001/cov_08162001.html
In a normal market where commodities are manufactured, research is hard to fund. It's been monopolies like Bell Labs and the National Gov't which have really pushed things forward because they had both the cash and the desire to do so.
1984 was pretty dead on. The govt funds science and technology because we need to compete with other nations economically and ultimately, millitarily. It is this threat which forces polititians to rely on science rather than simply make up and propagate their own facts. The government doesn't fund science because it wants to cure cancer or diabetes or help us understand the universe. It does it mostly so that we stay strong as a nation and can defend ourselves. A society which turned away from science and technology would eventually fail to defend itself. All research is supposed to support American industry or the American millitary.
Perhaps the researchers should apply for weapons grants, stating that the technology they develop will be able to help countless soldiers on and off the battlefield, returning them to war quicker than ever before. That'd probably stur the couldron a bit.
At the end of the day, unfortunately, that's the whole idea. If you don't believe me, check out the justifications for the Baye- Dole act and technology transfer acts to see what polititians thing the role of science should be now that the cold war is over.
The Baye-Dole Act of 1980 is significant, he explains, because it allowed ownership of federally-sponsored inventions to be taken from the public, and sold to corporations. "Before, if the feds invested in university research, the assumption was, whatever product was invented belonged to the people of the United States-the taxpayer pays, the taxpayer gets a result." Now, says Minsky, the product of a federally-funded project can be sold by a university to a private corporation "which then owns a product produced by taxpayer money, to be sold back to the taxpayer, at any amount they decide."
http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archives/cov_stories_
We're talking human beings.
No, we're not. This is the thing that "Human-at-conception" camp, which refers to itself as "pro-life" constantly ignores, no matter how many times it's brought up. All human cells do not have rights. Only individuals have rights. Embryonic stem cells are not individuals for a variety of reasons.
Those who want to assert that life begins at conception frequently fall back on logic that flies in the face of longstanding legal precedent. They say embryos are human, for example, because they represent a unique set of human DNA. But if this definition of what is human were true, it would be okay to kill a twin as long as the other twin remained. It's not. A human is more than simply a set of cells with unique DNA. And we've recognized that for thousands of years. The set of cells must also pass a certain stage of development. Otherwise, any stem cell which could potentially be cloned through somatic cell transfer would be human.
While many socieites differed radicially from ours in terms of their legal code, and assigned rights to a patriarch, a family, or a nation, our society assigns rights primarily to individual human beings.
Cells don't have rights until they become individuals. An individual is one person, and one person only. Never two or three or possibly four people. An individual is only one person. An embryonic stem cell is one or two or possibly three people, or none at all if it doesn't attach to the uterine wall.
Likewise, the often repeated canard of 'what if you were aborted doesn't support those who say people are humans at conception unless you also don't believe in contraception, or any other act which would prevent the birth of a person. After all, if my parents had gone to the movies instead of making me, I wouldn't be here either. But what kind of logic is that? This is a case of assuming what you're trying to prove. People who don't believe than individuality starts at conception will never be persuaded by this argument, because they don't believe that they were 'them' at conception. They believe they were still a 'pre-individual.'
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you. Strange how the "human" dividing line moves so.
Moving? Are you claiming that he's applying one standard to himself, and another standard to other people. If so, I really don't think you understand his argument. But if you're saying that there are a lot of people who disagree with you and hold different moral standards which they apply to all people then yes, you're absolutely right.
Polititians still respond to the public on issues that the public is interested in. They listen to lobbies when they can't hear anyone else talking.
I'm basing this on a few friends who have volunteered at various political establishments.
Granted, they still lie like rugs ("We're looking into it", etc.)
Lobbies are effective because they can't be easily fooled and follow up. You can have grass roots lobbies. Look at the NRA. People call it the "Gun Lobby" but it has power because it has a lot of grass roots support.
Too much cynicism breeds non-action.
A private company can buy out its competitors or drive them out of business. This happens a lot with software companies, even more so than in other industries. FOSS software can't be bought out or forced out of business. Because of this, FOSS software can prevent companies from gaining and abusing a monopoly position. Because FOSS is free, it keeps commercial software companies from charging too much, because people can always go to the cheaper competition. (assuming they don't just pirate the commercial software)
Make sense?
In my day we used Prodigy and had to pay for each individual e-mail. It made us consider our words carefully and write deliberately.
In my day, we didn't have fancy tools like Yahoo messenger. If we wanted to be distracted from our work, we had to play minesweeper or flirt with our neighibors. But it prevented us from getting into long distance relationships with flirtatious people we would never meet, gosh darnit.
In my day, we didn't have Google. We had tools like Archie and Gopher. And when we were sick of using those to try and find what we wanted, we asked our neighibors or just looked the darn information up. And sure, it wasn't as good as this newfangled technology they got now. But it was reliable. I tell ya, the dictionary we have has been in our family for over 40 years. It belonged to my grandpappy. And it's never been down, or required rebooting, or been subject to a DDOS attack. Nosirrie. Worst thing that ever happed was little Elsie got Jam on one of the pages and we had to tear it out before it rotted. But noone cares about the meaning of effluvius anyhoo.
I tell ya, kids these days.
I think this whole "one or the other" type of argument is a red herring.
The software industry naturally tends towards 'killer aps' which is a nice way of saying that it tends towards monopoly, even more so than traditional industry does. Being able to design a program once, and then produce millions of copies for profit is just too big an incentive to consolidate. It also makes for an incredible economy of scale, so that small companies have a hard time competing.
Look at Adobe's recent purchase of Macromedia to see which way the industry is going.
It's hard for a startup to compete with a readily established killer ap. Take Photoshop, for instance. If someone said "I'm going to start up a company that tries to do what photoshop does" I wouldn't want to invest my money there, unless it pandered to a special niche market - maybe designing 3D skins.
Competition is vital to keep the cost of proprietary systems reasonable. Also, monopolies have a bad history of abusing their customers.
Because OSS software is the most reliable model for giving sustained competition to programs which would otherwise come to monopolize their industry, open source is a vital suppliment to closed source software. It can't be bought out in the same way a private company can, and its low cost puts some downward pressure on the price of closed source systems.
Vigellanteism [sic] is okay if you can get away with it and noone is physically hurt and no property damaged.
I've heard the same argument for terrorism...
By consistently trying to use absurdly extreme examples, you've made the same mistake in your reply as you did in your previous post.
Terrorism involves actions which are, in themselsevs, crimes. Murder, violence or the threat of these things.
If you don't damage property or people, and don't threaten to do so (in other words if your vigellantism is LEGAL), then it can be used against people like spammers.
There are acceptable ways for people to protest and express their outrage short of employing a legal system which is fundamentally inaccessable to those who can't afford its services.
I don't think the story is true (or if so can you post a link?) More of a running joke. Though a potato chip magnate did invest heavily in Micron.
Just so noone gets confused.
I can buy American music in China, in the Philippines. Anywhere.
There were Vietnamese soldiers fighting against the US during Vietnam and listening to American music.
Say what you want about American music, but to subvert an old saying "I don't know what's good, but I know what's popular."
They're using the latin pluralization because it was originally a latin word. Like bacterium and bacteria rather than bacterias.
Foreign words are usually pluralized by foreign rules till they've been in the language for a certain amount of time. And it's this length of time that's under debate.
I can't the pluralization is supposed to be viri or virii though.
hey didn't invite you to visit the Web site to waste their computer resources. Saying "We were invited, so it's legal" is like saying that being invited to someone's house for dinner makes it 100% okay to show up, shit on the table, punch the other guests in the faces, and then break a few windows on the way out.
These acts are crimes in themselves. Filling out a web form is not.
The point was, replying with a garbage reply is not SPAM because you were invited to the page, explicitly. The spammer was not invited.
If you believe your own arguments, why wouldn't the spam complaints be legal?
The less clear cut their case, the less likely they are to retaliate legally. It would be hard for the government to make absurd business offers by invited parties illegal, no matter how odd the offers are. They can make DDOS attacks stick in court though. Personally, I don't think that replying to spam is illegal in the first place (unless, perhaps, you provide false information), but even if you do break the law, spammers are unlikely to waste money on legal expenses.
Vigellanteism is okay if you can get away with it and noone is physically hurt and no property damaged.
Don't get me wrong, most of them are extremely nice people who are eager to learn about other cultures, however there are some who are incredibly racist, and think that just because they have the largest population on Orkut, that they don't have to follow the rules when it says English Only in a community.
There are Brazillians coming to our chat site? There goes the neighborhood!
Of course, I could springboard from here to legalization arguments, but that would bring me way OT...
I'm all for legalizing online communication, even if it has been proven to be addictive. Sites like PubMed have been proven to have real thereputic value.