Remember Scooter Libby? Got thown in jail for Vallery Plame? Except he didn't. He got thrown in jail for "lying".
Erm, you're half right. He didn't get thrown in jail at all. George W. Bush commuted his sentence. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/02/libby.sentence/index.html
Now it's backed by faith. How's that working out for everybody?
Gold also only has value because people believe it does - as the GP post said, you can't eat it, you can't really build a shelter out of it, etc.
In any event, why should the money supply be tied to a rare, precious metal? Matching the growth (or shrinkage!) of the money supply based solely on the discovery, loss, or recovery of a particular natural resource hardly seems like a good plan for managing the economy.
I think you mean "persecution". I'm pretty sure the legal system is meant to be for prosecution.
As has been said before, any issue that is not black and white will be cut, beaten, reworded, altered, reframed, redefined, polarized, radicalized, and several more things until it becomes black and white, and then the two parties will take sides, each declaring their side to be 100% perfect good, and the other side to be 100% perfect evil. I don't know why you would expect anything else.
The true freedom is that we have options. RMS wants everybody to live by his definition of "freedom", but his is pretty narrow and restrictive, which kinda defeats the purpose of the concept of freedom.
RMS wants to limit your ability to give away your freedom. You can't choose to sell yourself into slavery. Right now, you can choose to give your data to someone who can choose, if they wish, to restrict your freedom. Some people advocate that you should be able to sell yourself into slavery, but I'm not convinced that this is really a good idea...
If the average consumer sees charges of $5 on their bill from based on sending spam, then they have an incentive to get their computer cleaned up and locked down. Right now, it doesn't cost the owners of compromised computers anything (except some speed of their program execution, I guess) to be part of the botnet, so they don't have much incentive to do anything about it.
I'm not saying I support this scheme; that's just the idea behind it.
Except this is wrong. When you consume the competitor's apple, he doesn't have an apple anymore (and can't plant the seeds).
But it sucks breaking up too, but I don't see too many people lobbying to pass laws requiring girlfriends to give thirty days notice before dumping their asses.
You're right, but then again, your job is ostensibly what you do in order to make money in order to have a place to live and food to eat. Possibly for your family, too. If I split with my girlfriend, I don't have to find another in a very short period of time in order to continue eating, having a home, et cetera.
(Yes, I know this ignores the case of someone living with his girlfriend and depending on her to support him. I'm not sure what you can do about this kind of scenario, but it is VERY different from a hardworking person suddenly fired from his job with a wife, children, and possibly elderly parents to support.)
Let the highly skilled people make more decisions, and defend them when they do so, by making it illegal to sue hospitals for trying to help you -- only for lack of trying. As it is today, if a doctor has a choice between a procedure that slightly improves 70% of the patients and does nothing for the rest, or one that cures 95% and maims 5%, he will almost always have to go for the former, cause the 5% unlucky ones will sue.
Not far enough. The whole tort system needs to be altered to stop paying out money just because something bad happened. The way it used to work, and should work, was that your lawsuit only had merit if you could show the doctor was wrong to choose the 95%-success course of action. If he was, the wrong decision or negligence or whatever is punished. There used to be consideration of what a reasonable (competent in the field) person (doctor) would have done. Not anymore.
During a smoke break I saw a blurb on CNN that Steve Jobs is calling for music companies to remove copy protection from their songs.
Isn't Steve Jobs running Apple Computer, the company that sues people over making computers the same color as theirs?
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
