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I don't know what dictionary you have, but here's what the Concise Oxford says:

I said I checked multiple and that many mentioned a free market. Quoting one that doesn't doesn't invalidate the overall point. References:

American Heritage: "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."

Merriam-Webster: "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market"

Not that you should be learning about economic or political systems from dictionaries.

Oh please. If you want some basic definitions, they are fine.

Your local library should have an entire section on these subjects.

You enjoy going to the library. I'll use whatever references are online. Speaking of which, here's a quote from a classic version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Thus capitalism is essentially based on freedom - the freedom of the subscriber in risking his money, and the freedom of the consumer in giving or withholding his custom and the profit that it makes possible."

Competition is the key idea, not whether or not a company is free to sell their goods.

This is just bizarre. How can you have unfettered competition if a company isn't allowed to freely sell their goods?

You can have free market capitalism, but you can still have capitalism without a free market---capitalism tells us that private owners control the means of production, but doesn't tell us how they get their products to consumers.

Technically you can, in a very strict definition of capitalism, but in common usage, and also based on the theory of capitalism, and the common sense of what it means to own something, it is closely associated with being able to sell your goods in a free market. The references I found didn't associate them by accident.

What one can deduce from your references is that none has any bearing whatsoever on the core texts of Christianity.

The core text of Christianity - the Bible - says that homosexuals are to be put to death. This is very clear, and has been used by Saints, Bishops, Emperors, and other leaders of the Church to justify putting homosexuals to death throughout the ages.

You do *not* reference canon law, but focus on decisions of (at the time) political bodies who had a relation to the church.

These were not just "political bodies" in a modern sense. Bishops, Saints, Emperors, and other Church leaders in Christian theocracies decreed that, based upon the Bible, homosexuality was punishable by death under Christian law. Canon 34 not only endorsed Leviticus but also interpreted Paul's Epistle to the Romans as advocating capital punishment Who do you think made up the Canons? You can't just dismiss laws that you don't like as being made by "political bodies" or "not the word of Jesus" - Jesus did not write the religious laws, God did not write the religious laws, so if you're going to dismiss one as being the failed work of a human, then logically you must dismiss them all.

where exactly did Justinian find 70.000 homosexuals in antiquity ? I mean that would be the population of several countries at the time, and those would all have to be homosexual

You are wrong about the population figures. The estimated world population in the year 1.A.D is 200 million people. In 1000 A.D. it is 310 million people. Rome alone fought a single war in 90A.D. or so in which 300,000 people were killed. At its peak the plague of the Justinian era was recorded to have killed 10,000 people a day in Constantinople alone. Besides, the conversion of the 70,000 is well documented:

efforts directed against them resulted in the forcible baptism of 70,000 persons in Asia Minor alone.

John of Ephesus, Inquisitor, began a campaign of forced conversion in 542... 70,000 people were forced to convert.

The quote actually states that the law was used against his political enemies as well as homosexuals, so it isn't necessarily the case that all of the dead were homosexual. And obviously the example given of 70,000 people forcibly converted in a single campaign does not mean that they were all homosexuals either.

You're right, of course, that some Christians did persecute homosexuals

An understatement. In the majority of the Christian nations of the world homosexuality has been illegal for most of the past two thousand years.

"having been invented in Japan, according to tradition, by the emperor Yao, 2350 B.c"

--Yao was a Chinese emperor.

"19 horizontal and 9 vertical lines, making 361 intersections"

--math is tough:(

"he player enclosing the greater number of vacant points being the winner."

--one's score in Go consists both of occupied and surrounded points (or, almost equivalently, of surrounded points one's captured stones)

"This game is played in England upon a board divided into 361 squares, the men being placed upon these instead of upon the intersections."

--I've never heard of this...

regards,

-John

Yes, but...
      The old model isn't really the old model. There was a time, that ended around World War 1, that the best enyclopedias tended to have articles by really top experts in their fields, i.e. Thomas Edison writng about his own inventions, or Woodrow Wilson about European geopolitics. That didn't necessarily eliminate bias (sometimes far from it), but it did often greatly boost quality in other ways.
      Here's an online version of one of the best examples - the "Love to Know" encyclopedia, based on the Britanica 11th edition, for those interested in seeing what encyclopedia meant once:

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/

  By 1940 or so at most, the overwhelming majority of new encyclopedia articles were by staff writers, who were generally not known for any original (as opposed to synthetic) contributions to the fields they addressed, who sometimes interviewed really primary sources directly, but were often at third remove or more. For articles updating older entries, there was almost never new deep research done. An update on Relativity, for example was likely to involve taking the opinion of an easily accessable local college professor as to how an older version should be rewritten for modern readers.
      Digital Universe could be very similar to the late era print model, and have entries mostly by academics for 'major' subjects and hobby writers for 'minor' ones, or it could deliberately leverage the hypertext-like online model, the ease and speed of modifying flawed entries and seeing the corrections propagate, the easing of editorial space restrictions for 'minor' subjects, and other net-typical advantages to go back to the older old model, which (IMHO), would make the results much more tolerable.

BS - They do represent you, just like the represent record companies. The difference is the record companies utilize superior tactics persuading representatives to their point of view. And no, this isnt always in the form of bribes or benefits, there are good politicians on both sides of the isle that are simply misinformed.

Anyone on our side of the debate that raises their voice is usually a fanatic or at least considered one (FSF is a good example).

Believe it or not, not every OSS advocate is a GPL fan and they dont need to be.

Prove the idea of fair use, let congressman see what a future would be like that is completely DRM centric and employ intelligent and professional lobbyists. Get the message heard, comprehended and acted on.

There are plenty of other resources online that are free:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/
http://encarta.msn.com/

Those are just a few.

The point of my original comment is that Wiki entries are "Open Source". I love open source but disseminating information based on rumor and opinion of the writer is not a good use of open source when the actual intent is to give information based on facts. This is much akin to the media world. Many news stories (much like many Wiki entries) are written by individuals that have already formed a bias about the topic and rather than just state the facts, they allow their personal opinions and feelings skew the entry and thus, skew the facts.

The reader is left, as I stated before, with a mishmash of fact and fiction.

Furthermore, if another user disagrees with a Wiki entry, they can pretty much just change it to reflect their views.

As for your comment that this works for the Internet as a whole, you are correct to a certain degree. However, the difference being, many people are misled in regard to Wiki, thinking it is based wholly on fact purely because of the name they use, specifically the "pedia" portion.

Of course, I have heard people say "I saw/read it on the Internet so it must be true".

I would have tried to get a student position with Roger Bacon. It would be fun inventing all aspects of science and technology from first principles 650 years before they actually happened.

I'm suprised more geeks don't read Bacon - his complaints about incompetent authority and his plans for dealing with it could do with a better airing today! And his proposals for creating and structuring an Internet are first-class. Then again, you do need 11th century Latin. :(

Try http://84.1911encyclopedia.org/B/BA/BACON_ROGER.ht m for a taster.

Eratosthenes (284-192 B.C.) , the librarian of Alexandria, was able to determine the circumference of the Earth to an accuracy of 0.1-0.5% . . . Eratosthenes measured it to be 40,000 km (24,855 miles), and the current accepted figure is 40,032 km (24,875 miles).

Also, he was measuring the polar circumference of the Earth, not the equatorial circumference. The mean polar circumference is 40,008 km.

I think EB has started to get beyond their dismissiveness stage concerning Wikipedia and are starting to come to the realization that Wikipedia, not Encarta, is their number 1 long term threat.

That said, it would be wonderful to compare the oldest version of EB's article on Alexandar Hamilton available to the Wikipedia version. Ideally their 3 year old version would be best to compare since that is the age of the Wikipedia version but let's look at their 11th edition version at http://14.1911encyclopedia.org/H/HA/HAMILTON_ALEXA NDER.htm (EB should have had an article on Hamilton for over a hundred years by that time).

Well, for one thing is has extaclty the same birth date issue (his major criticism)!

Or when the current editor-in-chief of EB said in a recent Guardian article at http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=Leisure-Onli ne&o=140475&sa=106;

"People write on things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on the UK TV soap opera Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."

Which is an odd comparison since EB does not have an article on Hurricane Frances or Coronation Street, and the Wikipedia article on Tony Blair has been longer than the EB version for well over a year. Oh, and the Coronation Street article on Wikipedia is not twice the size of the Tony Blair article (in fact, they are about the same size).

Oh, and the German Wikipedia won hands down in breadth, depth, and comprehensibility of content, in a head-to-head comparison between Brockhaus and Microsoft's Encarta (German version) conducted by the German nation-wide newspaper Die Zeit. See http://www.zeit.de/2004/43/C-Enzyklop_8adien-Test

I'm sure a similar study conducted on the English Wikipedia except against EB and Encarta, would have the same results.

Wikipedia has been around for less than 4 years. These other encyclopedias have been around for much, much longer.

I have a nice example: in the 1911 edition of Britannica, it was written that the city of Bucharest was errected on the site of the Roman fortress of Thyanus.

I looked in several histories of Bucharest and couldn't find that. It was obviously a in-joke:
Thy + Anus = Your Anus.

It was Erected on Your Anus. :-)

It seems that the GNAA existed back in 1911 and was working at Britannica.

Mostly true except that Louis VI probably never heard of America. Credits are due to Louis XVI :), a couple of centuries later.

Finally somebody who gets it! Terrorism may be some threat, but a government saying "Boo" every day is a much bigger threat.

I live in the area of Huntsville, Alabama. This city besides being home to much of Uncle Sam's "Whizz Bang Gun" development and management is also home to a substantial part of the US Space Effort.

Huntsville, Alabama is the home to a monument that tells just how much a lie "Homeland Security" and all this secrecy stuff is. The monument one block east of Monroe and Green Street intersection is to the encampment of Andrew Jackson (US $20 Bill). There he camped on his way to Horseshoe Bend. There the followers of Manitu a extremist religious sect of American Indians doing exactly what happened with 9/11/2001 (except the aircraft) to US People were smashed by Andrew Jacksons small force and an 50,000 man Cherokee Army.

This war was so identical to the current one that it even had a mad one eyed prophet like Mullah Omar leading it and a charismatic leader like Osama Bin Ladin. The military defeats as important as the were were not the solution. The solution was not a CIA-FBI "connect a dot" either. It was the rise of an art falling into disrespect in the USA at this time. It was the rise of CITIZENSHIP.

The simple fact is that no level of secrets will protect the world from terrorists. The only thing that can protect from these awful people is the agressive deliberate pattern of watching out for and caring for your fellow man. Take the Madrid Train bombings for example. They would have been prevented by as simple an act as one person noting that another had dropped his bag and was leaving the train. The simple act of kindness of paying attention and saying "Excuse me you forgot your bag" would have made the whole situation much safer. The strange behavior of either picking it up and staying on the train or leaving it behind deliberately would have been the tip-off. This is Citizenship! Citizenship is also being armed and ready to oppose as well. But you see, that doesn't require shaking US Taxpayers down for a Trillion Dollars or make political leaders powerful does it?

The study is entirely correct. The data access is no problem. The problem is people not caring for each other.

Side Note: In Iraq the USA cannot win. It is impossible. ONLY IRAQ can win or lose in Iraq. If they do not develop the serious caring for each other and this art of Citizenship, they can only hope for destruction. The USA may defeat their terrorists and make the country momentarily "peaceful" but until Iraqi people develop "Citizenship" they are doomed. In developing Citizenship, the victory of the Iraqi's will also be a US Victory. Their failure will not represent a defeat of the USA. On the contrary it will represent a normal condition outside the USA and just a continuation of danger for the USA. In the History of Mankind this victory of Iraq is critical for the safety of mankind. These lessons from the back woods of Alabama and Indiana are PROFOUNDLY IMPORTANT!

as an attorney in the US, i can say it is pretty easy to get a case filed (pretty much just pay a fee and write some stuff down). actually having the case move forward is another thing. the big amount of law relating to suits by criminals/trespassers has to do w/ using too much force in relation to the amount threatened. if some crazy person breaks into your house and threatens you with a spoon, you can't shoot them (unless you fear for your life). also, automatic things that use deadly force, like a spring gun (my personal favorite) are not allowed.

This is a great submission. I too was a weather geek before (or rather while becoming) a computer geek.

Here's another bit of trivia related to atmospheric physics that can come in handy: Buys Ballots Law.

Basically, in the northern hemisphere, if the wind is at your back low pressure is on your left (on your right for those of you down south). When you combine that bit of trivia with the knowledge that most bad weather is associated with low pressure, it comes in handy when trying to plan a golf game during a FROPA (frontal passage).

--K.

Laws should be checked for constitutiality before they are passed.
If that is not feasible, they should be re-examined as soon as sufficient doubt arises.

Who was it that said that price of freedom is eternal vigilance?

When I was a kid, my primary source of knowledge was the 13th edition of the Encylopededia Britannica, published nearly 50 years before I was born. I still have it, though I rarely use it now, as the bindings are shot. Naturally, it was supplemented by a few thousand other volumes.

The 13th edition, btw, was basically the 11th edition with
3 supplemental volumes covering the World War.

No, the Church has never sold indulgences, because an indulgence can't be sold. There are different types of indulgences, and one type involved giving alms, which some people misinterpreted as "buying" an indulgence. But the indulgence is received only if you're in a state of grace, if you reject sin with all your heart, etc. Giving money, by itself, would not get you anything as far as the indulgence was concerned.

Secondly, an indulgence does not gain anyone the forgiveness of their sins. That happens at confession. An indulgence forgives you the temporal punishment for sin (whether on earth or in purgatory). But to obtain an indulgence, you already have to be in a state of grace, with no mortal sins on your soul.

Yet truth, history, and facts are all against you on this, as on so many other of your defenses of the indefensible behavior of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Sixtus IV, in a Bull in 1476, extended the right of use of excess good works done by saints, and "extended this privilege to souls in purgatory, provided that their living relatives purchased indulgences for them (emphasis added)". That's one clear, direct, incontrovertible proof that you're wrong.

Leo X commissioned Friar Johann Tetzel to sell indulgences. Tetzel's pitch was "as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs". This was the final straw that drove Luther to nail his theses to the cathedral door. It was also the source of funds for the construction of St. Peter's in Rome. From here:

TETZEL, JOHANN (c. 1460-1519), preacher and salesman of papal indulgences, the son of Hans Tetzel, a goldsmith of Leipzig, was born there about 1460. He matriculated at the university in 1482, graduated B.A. in 1487, and in 1489 entered the Dominican convent at Leipzig. He early discovered his vocation as a preacher of indulgences; he combined the elocutionary gifts of a revivalist orator with the shrewdness of an auctioneer.

He painted in lurid colours the terrors of purgatory, while he dwelt on the cheapness of the indulgence which would purchase remission and his prices were lowered as each sale approached its end. He began in 1502 in the service of the Cardinal-legate Raymond Peraudi; and in the next few years he visited Freiberg (where he extracted 2000 gulden in two days), Dresden, Pirna, Leipzig, Zwickau and Gorlitz. Later on he was at Nuremherg, Ulm and Innsbruck, where he is said to have been condemned to imprisonment for adultery, but released at the intercession of the elector of Saxony. This charge is denied by his apologists; and though his methods were attacked by good Catholics like Johann Hass, he was elected prior of the Dominicans in Glogau in 1505.

Fresh scope was given to his activity in 1517 by archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Albrecht had been elected at the age of twenty-four to a see already impoverished by frequent successions and payments of annates to Rome. He had agreed with Pope Leo X. to pay his first-fruits in cash, on condition that he were allowed to recoup himself by the saie of indulgences. Half the proceeds in his province were to go to him, half to Leo X. - for building the basilica of St Peter's at Rome. Tetzel was selected as the most efficient saksman; he was appointed general sub-commissioner for indulgences, and was accompanied by a clerk of the Fuggers from whom Albrecht had borrowed the money to pay his first-fruits. Tetzel?s efforts irretrievably damaged the complicated and abstruse Catholic doctrine on the subject of indulgences; as soon as the coin clinks in the chest, he cried, the soul is freed from purgatory. in June he was at Magdeburg, Halle and Naumburg; the~ elector of Saxony excluded him from his dominions, but Albrecht?s brother, the elector Joachim of Brandenburg, en

Something that's been bothering me for years.

Why can't I see "canals" by looking at high-quality photographs of Mars from a distance, and/or squinting?

Percival Lowell and his team at Flagstaff published detailed drawings in which there was a veritable spiderweb of canals, dozens and dozens of them spanning the whole planet.

It's now accepted that these long, linear features were a kind of optical illusion.

But why can't I experience the optical illusion for myself?

An interesting near-contemporary account is givenin this article in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica "Of the reality of the better marked ones there can be no doubt, as they have been seen repeatedly by many observers, including those at the Lick Observatory, and have actually been photographed at the Lowell Observatory. The doubt is therefore confined to the vast network of lines so fine that they never certainly have been seen elsewhere than at Flagstaff. The difficulty of pronouncing upon their reality arises from the fact that we have to do mainly with objects not plainly visible (or, as Lowell contends, not plainly visible elsewhere). The question therefore becomes one of psychological optics rather than of astronomy. When the question is considered from this point of view it is found that combinations of light and shaded areas very different from continuous lines, will, under certain conditions, be interpreted by the eye as such lines; and when such is the case, long practice by an observer, however carefully conducted, may confirm him in this interpretation. "

The gods do bear and will allow in kings

The things which they abhor in rascal routes.

Buckhurst's Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex.

So, "GNU"'s also not "gnu", in spite of the hairy ox on the FSF homepage.

Uh, that'd be an antelope.