With real user and process separation Also available on Windows. I cry bullshit on that. I used to hear for a long time "So many people say Windows is insecure, but they run as Administrator all the time. They should run as an unprivileged user." And that sounded reasonable, so I pretty much believed it. So the next time I had to use Windows, I made an unprivileged account, and discovered that the restrictions placed on unprivileged users are so arbitrary and absurd that it's essentially impossible to work that way. You can't even change your own file associations. I had to keep logging in and out of my user and admin accounts all day to get anything done.
Maybe things have improved in Vista, but the user separation on Windows XP seems to be designed to drive you insane.
Answer me this; when trolls appear on a major message board, is the solution to close the board altogether? I didn't (or at least, not today) advocate completely ending the patent system. I just pointed out that Apple's lawyer has a vested interest in preferring litigation to patent reform.
Why bother with a rewrite when making dedicated teams to deal with questionable patents takes care of the problem more directly.... I have suggested... not a rewrite or a remake of the system, but a moderation system added to it. To my mind, such changes are more logically made by legislators than judges. If you think (as I do) that a lot of the problem stems from judges' bad interpretation of vague laws in the first place, then the logical conclusion is for the legislature to step in and clarify the law. Whether they do that by rewriting it or amending it doesn't matter.
Oh, and the purpose of an example is just that; it's an example. Sure, and I was just saying that in my opinion this is a bad example. By "bad" I mean "not shedding light on the topic" because the analogy is not close enough. If you ignore a forum troll, you render them completely harmless. If you ignore a patent troll, you stand to lose your shirt. Also, forum trolls exist in a semianonymous world, such that they can endlessly reinvent themselves, whereas patent trolls are relatively few in number and exist in a world where they could effectively be banned, if you could agree on how to identify them.
Would you seriously spend hours upon hours rethinking and redoing the entire message board style just because of some annoying trolls, or would you just squash the trolls under your mighty bannination powers? The latter is much easier, and makes a lot more sense. Are you joking, or is this a metatroll? You're posting this on a board that has an incredibly elaborate system to minimize the impact of trolling, and still barely copes with it. Banning is pretty well proven not to deal with trolls, even if you disallow anonymous posting.
Anyway, your comparison of forum trolls to patent trolls is specious. Patent trolls have a large economic incentive, and their actions are significantly more damaging.
[Apple's] Lutton believes that the key to fixing the country's patent problems lies with the court Easily said, if you're a lawyer retained by a company with a huge wallet.
The word you're looking for is Anarchism - where everything he did would be legal precisely because absolutely nothing would be illegal Wow, yeah I guess that's accurate, but to characterize anarchism as "everything would be legal" just demonstrates a mind that is completely unable to see the world except through a lens of "legality." Anarchism means many things to many people, but the people who are serious about it wouldn't tolerate this guy's behavior in their community -- they just wouldn't invoke some faceless goon squad to deal with it. They'd deal with it themselves.
Please don't bother to reply and tell me how much you think anarchism wouldn't work. I don't care. I'm just writing to correct the impression that anarchism means "anything goes." I can't remember which anarchist I'm (probably mis)quoting here, but "If we believed authority were required to have order, we would prefer the authority that saddens and imprisons life to the chaos that makes it impossible."
That's because most of the public will just blindly accept anything that claims to be based on "science, or research". Except global warming, evolution, etc., etc.
The public only know three types of things: those that smack them in the face; those they care enough to look up; and those that someone can make a profit by shouting in their ears. And very little except sports and sex falls under category two.
Wow, you are seriously rewriting history, dude. Don't you remember all those statements by the administration claiming they had proof they couldn't show us, and then coming out with a few lame fuzzy satellite photos of trailers and shit? A lot of people didn't buy it at the time -- including me and most of the people I know. I mean, no one doubts that Iraq had once had some hairy weapons programs (find me a government that hasn't), but it was seriously hard to believe they had anything that would threaten the US. Just because you were suckered, you're saying "we all thought..."? Come on, learn from your mistake and move on.
Well, I read the article, but I have heard the same argument a million times, and it's irrelevant to my point, which is that even if some authority backs you up, employing usages that are generally understood to be ignorant marks you as ignorant.
Yes, the language changes. I happily use a lot of words and phrases that didn't exist a few years ago. Some changes add precision and color to the language. But others detract from it.
"Beg the question," "literally," and "enormity" are essentially useless now, because if you employ them with their older meanings, you will likely be misunderstood, while if you use them in the newer senses, the better educated portion of your audience will think you're an idiot. Worse yet, there are no good synonyms for the first two terms, so the language has just lost any good way to express those concepts. Meanwhile, the newer meanings were already well served by existing terms, so these changes add nothing.
Yes, change happens. And just as I'm not thrilled about changes like deforestation, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and Windows Vista, I don't get behind laisez-faire linguists who encourage people to embrace usages that arise from ignorance and muddy the language.
I'm not one of these people who runs around correcting people every time they open their mouths. I'm really not. I just comment on it since the subject came up.
If the rest of the world decided to start calling apples "oranges" tomorrow and you decided to go about correcting them, who in fact would be more wrong? What if 49% of the people started calling apples "oranges"? What if 10% did? What is the cut-off where something that started out as a misunderstanding becomes the new understanding? These days, if you can find a few other people who share your misapprehension, you can declare it "the new usage."
When I hear someone trot out the "modern, popular usage" of "beg the question" or, say, "enormity" or "irregardless," well, I know those things are sanctioned by more populist dictionaries, but I pretty much assume the person is just using words they don't understand, which gives me a negative impression of them. And when people defend those usages, I think "here is someone who can't stand to find out they were wrong about something."
Why do you assume that the OP does not have specific acts of the US government in mind that he would characterize as terrorism? Just because the word "terrorism" is overused doesn't make it invalid to argue that someone is a terrorist. True, it would be a lot more useful to list some examples, but that just makes the poster guilty of poor debate skills -- not exactly the "height of stupidity" -- maybe more around the midsection.
Most companies don't require a majority of consumers to patronize them in order to stay in business. If I open an arcade where people pay me to skin sweet little baby bunnies alive, it doesn't matter from an economic standpoint that 95% of the town is against me, as long as the other 5% pay me enough to stay in business. However, a majority of consumers certainly can push through any legislation they care enough about. Bunny killer:p
If you don't like the way a company does business, just don't buy their product. Personally, I'm not finding that to be particularly effective. All the companies I hate and refuse to buy from seem to still be thriving.
I am wracking my brain to figure out what it means to have 24,000 searchable databases. I guess all your databases are belong to Ancestry.com.
I'm also curious as to why Lawbean would just post the text of an Associated Press article/press release without attribution or commentary. They certainly leave the impression that they're endorsing the service.
Consider this... almost nobody has actually gone to the store and bought a copy of Windows. Cite please? They seem to have a lot of boxes of Windows at my local computer store -- I doubt they'd waste the shelf space if no one was buying it.
I've been primarily using Linux for 9 years, but I personally have bought 2 copies of Windows at the store (one for my wife, one for me, in both cases because we had contract work that required it).
Many services are cheaper for individuals than businesses, including electricity in some places. And come now, do you honestly believe that a more progressive tax on gas has any chance of leading to food being taxed more before leisure? If you want to make a "slippery slope" argument, you have to come up with something a little more believable.
Honestly, I'm not particularly opposed to a flat tax on gas, as long as it continues to be offset by a progressive income tax. I just quibbled with the OP's assertion that there was only one "fair" way to look at it.
Your entire argument is semantic. You equate taxes with punishment and draw some muddled distinction between benefiting and deriving value, and another one between providing and reallocating. All I can get from this is you think poor people are lazy. Sorry, please try again when you have a real argument to make.
Wow, thank you for deciding what fairness is. I had no idea they'd gotten around to giving someone authority to decide that "no ifs ands or buts." But it seems they picked the wrong person. If I had the job, I'd declare fairness states that the person who benefits most from the roads would pay the most in (road) taxes. That's not necessarily the person who uses them most. If two guys drive the same distance to work every day, and one gets paid minimum wage for doing backbreaking labor while the other gets a huge salary for sitting behind a desk, seems perfectly fair to me that the latter contributes more to road upkeep -- the roads are worth a lot more to him.
the BSD license is more "free" than the GPL The question isn't whether the license is free. The question is whether the software is free. Tons of little BSD daemons are slaving away behind bars in corporate prisons, while the Linux penguins are romping around free under the southern lights. Of course Tivo is worried: GPLv3 is a cake with a file in it for the poor guys locked up in Tivos, so they can bust out and join their brethren, holding flippers and singing songs of freedom and joy.
I think you're letting researchers off the hook too easy. There are a million things to research, yet many people choose to work on projects that have dubious implications for society. I mean, sure, there's a lot of gray area between searching for a cancer cure and weaponizing anthrax, but I see no reason to excuse scientists from at least asking themselves where their work falls on that spectrum, and whether what they're doing is likely to improve or damage our world.
Back to Neanderthal times... I'm afraid moving forward to Neanderthal times isn't any better. If we have slow down to go in the right direction, so be it.
P.S. Incidentally, this is why Exxon and the republicans can manipulate the debate on global climate change so easily, they prop up one loony with demonstratably false data or assertions and now global climate change is "in debate" when the reality is that the population, nor the reporters disseminating the falsity can be bothered to distinguish between good scientific work and bad. I generally agree with your post, but you make it sound like figuring out who to believe when scientific issues are debated is a simple matter. It's not. I like to think I'm a bit smarter and better informed than the average dude, but honestly I don't have the time to wade through dozens or hundreds of climate studies to figure out whose science is "good" or "bad," especially when zillions of dollars are being spent to propogandize me in either direction. Like most people, I'm left to try to judge based on my guess at the credibility of various aggregators and second-hand sources.
Newsflash: a wolf is not a dog. A domesticated wolf is called "a wolf." If you say "It's a domesticated wolf" and I say "it's safe to go in there... Watson Ladd said it's just a dog," then what I'm doing is called "lying." Words have meaning, and can be used with precision, when people care enough and wish to be honest. What Microsoft said is that they use some defensive coding strategies such that if the program finds itself in an illogical and potentially dangerous state, it exits. They do not say that this is a feature, nor do they say it is not a bug. They simply point out that it is not a security flaw.
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Maybe things have improved in Vista, but the user separation on Windows XP seems to be designed to drive you insane.
Why bother with a rewrite when making dedicated teams to deal with questionable patents takes care of the problem more directly
Anyway, your comparison of forum trolls to patent trolls is specious. Patent trolls have a large economic incentive, and their actions are significantly more damaging.
Please don't bother to reply and tell me how much you think anarchism wouldn't work. I don't care. I'm just writing to correct the impression that anarchism means "anything goes." I can't remember which anarchist I'm (probably mis)quoting here, but "If we believed authority were required to have order, we would prefer the authority that saddens and imprisons life to the chaos that makes it impossible."
The public only know three types of things: those that smack them in the face; those they care enough to look up; and those that someone can make a profit by shouting in their ears. And very little except sports and sex falls under category two.
Wow, you are seriously rewriting history, dude. Don't you remember all those statements by the administration claiming they had proof they couldn't show us, and then coming out with a few lame fuzzy satellite photos of trailers and shit? A lot of people didn't buy it at the time -- including me and most of the people I know. I mean, no one doubts that Iraq had once had some hairy weapons programs (find me a government that hasn't), but it was seriously hard to believe they had anything that would threaten the US. Just because you were suckered, you're saying "we all thought..."? Come on, learn from your mistake and move on.
Well, I read the article, but I have heard the same argument a million times, and it's irrelevant to my point, which is that even if some authority backs you up, employing usages that are generally understood to be ignorant marks you as ignorant.
Yes, the language changes. I happily use a lot of words and phrases that didn't exist a few years ago. Some changes add precision and color to the language. But others detract from it.
"Beg the question," "literally," and "enormity" are essentially useless now, because if you employ them with their older meanings, you will likely be misunderstood, while if you use them in the newer senses, the better educated portion of your audience will think you're an idiot. Worse yet, there are no good synonyms for the first two terms, so the language has just lost any good way to express those concepts. Meanwhile, the newer meanings were already well served by existing terms, so these changes add nothing.
Yes, change happens. And just as I'm not thrilled about changes like deforestation, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and Windows Vista, I don't get behind laisez-faire linguists who encourage people to embrace usages that arise from ignorance and muddy the language.
I'm not one of these people who runs around correcting people every time they open their mouths. I'm really not. I just comment on it since the subject came up.
When I hear someone trot out the "modern, popular usage" of "beg the question" or, say, "enormity" or "irregardless," well, I know those things are sanctioned by more populist dictionaries, but I pretty much assume the person is just using words they don't understand, which gives me a negative impression of them. And when people defend those usages, I think "here is someone who can't stand to find out they were wrong about something."
Why do you assume that the OP does not have specific acts of the US government in mind that he would characterize as terrorism? Just because the word "terrorism" is overused doesn't make it invalid to argue that someone is a terrorist. True, it would be a lot more useful to list some examples, but that just makes the poster guilty of poor debate skills -- not exactly the "height of stupidity" -- maybe more around the midsection.
Most companies don't require a majority of consumers to patronize them in order to stay in business. If I open an arcade where people pay me to skin sweet little baby bunnies alive, it doesn't matter from an economic standpoint that 95% of the town is against me, as long as the other 5% pay me enough to stay in business. However, a majority of consumers certainly can push through any legislation they care enough about. Bunny killer :p
I am wracking my brain to figure out what it means to have 24,000 searchable databases. I guess all your databases are belong to Ancestry.com.
I'm also curious as to why Lawbean would just post the text of an Associated Press article/press release without attribution or commentary. They certainly leave the impression that they're endorsing the service.
I've been primarily using Linux for 9 years, but I personally have bought 2 copies of Windows at the store (one for my wife, one for me, in both cases because we had contract work that required it).
Many services are cheaper for individuals than businesses, including electricity in some places. And come now, do you honestly believe that a more progressive tax on gas has any chance of leading to food being taxed more before leisure? If you want to make a "slippery slope" argument, you have to come up with something a little more believable.
Honestly, I'm not particularly opposed to a flat tax on gas, as long as it continues to be offset by a progressive income tax. I just quibbled with the OP's assertion that there was only one "fair" way to look at it.
Your entire argument is semantic. You equate taxes with punishment and draw some muddled distinction between benefiting and deriving value, and another one between providing and reallocating. All I can get from this is you think poor people are lazy. Sorry, please try again when you have a real argument to make.
Wow, thank you for deciding what fairness is. I had no idea they'd gotten around to giving someone authority to decide that "no ifs ands or buts." But it seems they picked the wrong person. If I had the job, I'd declare fairness states that the person who benefits most from the roads would pay the most in (road) taxes. That's not necessarily the person who uses them most. If two guys drive the same distance to work every day, and one gets paid minimum wage for doing backbreaking labor while the other gets a huge salary for sitting behind a desk, seems perfectly fair to me that the latter contributes more to road upkeep -- the roads are worth a lot more to him.
errr
Back to Neanderthal times... I'm afraid moving forward to Neanderthal times isn't any better. If we have slow down to go in the right direction, so be it.
Newsflash: a wolf is not a dog. A domesticated wolf is called "a wolf." If you say "It's a domesticated wolf" and I say "it's safe to go in there ... Watson Ladd said it's just a dog," then what I'm doing is called "lying." Words have meaning, and can be used with precision, when people care enough and wish to be honest. What Microsoft said is that they use some defensive coding strategies such that if the program finds itself in an illogical and potentially dangerous state, it exits. They do not say that this is a feature, nor do they say it is not a bug. They simply point out that it is not a security flaw.