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• You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
• 
  - C. S. Lewis

Cloning a human embryo doesn't invalidate millennia of ponderance on the existence of a soul, any more than any other technical breakthrough does. That's a little like claiming we can safely ignore gravity because we have airplanes.

I would suggest to even the most empirical thinker that the soul is a useful construct, allowing for abstract discussion of the difference between the sentient and the non-sentient, and to distinguish the status of living and non-living things.

I'm not sure which is cause for greater confusion, theologians pretending to be scientists or scientists pretending to be theologians.

Or perhaps it's me, neither one and trying to be both at once :-).

They simply don't want to know - China Telecom doesn't care because they're government-owned and there is no pressure coming from the government.

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

- Lily Tomlin (as Ernestine the operator on SNL)

Who hasn't seen this happen for touchscreen machines. More often than not the sensor plate thingy is offset downward of the screen so that when you press the screen the cursor will appear half an inch above it. There are two issues here.

1) Someone should fix the screen/driver so that it is aligned.

2) The woman is insane.

They keep saying in the article that they click on one candidate but then it gets "switched" to a vote for another candidate, as if the machine sees a Kerry vote and decides half a second later to change it to one for Bush. It's propaganda, for those of you who didn't look hard enough. Just another piece of that "There are evil people out there who want to rob you of your vote. If you see anything funny at the polls you'll know who's evil."

Yeah, I know - inflation and all. ;-)

Here is a link.

And for those TROLL moderators - GET A LIFE! IT WAS A JOKE!

Freedom requires dilegence. And action

Some dead guy once said something similar, to some extent:

The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.

Yeah, and a major reason they think this was a spectacularly poor choice of words by W.:

"This Crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while." - George W. Bush

What if almost nothing was worth *buying* from someone else because you could "replicate" it yourself locally? The end of (most) material scarcity is just one of the economic implications of molecular manufacturing; it will remove a lot of the incentive behind being an asshole trying to get ahead by any means necessary. Which reminds me of a quote:

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. -- John Maynard Keynes

--

Beyond Arthur C. Clarks famous quote? Not much.

I love SciFi because it's a technological/societal projection of what MIGHT happen in the future within the confines of our laws of physics. All of it ultimately leading up to our nearing Singularity.

In order for me to suspend my disbelief of the "wizards, ogres, and elves, oh my!" in Fantasy, I have to tell myself that this too is possible ... albeit within a very good matrix-like VR simulation where we can write our own laws of physics.

--

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

By the looks of it Mr. Currently-Owned-by-Microsoft Toulouse does not desire to be desired by Microsoft enough to feel he could die, but that's just what might happen if he keeps working on this mission impossible project.

Ah, you have nothing Toulouse^Wto lose, but your job at Microsoft.

"A witty saying proves nothing."--Voltaire

Historical records must not be skewed so that they may not tell all sides of the story

believe Poor Richard's Almanac (written by Benjamin Franklin) which went something like this:
When solving a problem it is common to take a method and try it. When it fails, try another. But above all, do something."

Are you sure you don't mean Franklin Roosevelt? Here, here, and another here. Of course, F. Franklin might have paraphrased B. Franklin.

What is interesting is the use of the word 'method'. It is usually used in a Scientific or Mathematical sense.

Actually, yes, I would. I would have to have faith in the fact that the world works in a certain way, and that time is linear, that other beings exist outside myself, that cause and effect exist, that my mind can in fact reason in a manner that lines up with things that happen outside my mind, etc. All of life requires faith.

That's an interesting perspective, but it's not one that everyone shares. For example, I don't. I don't have faith that time is linear. We're still learning about the precise nature of time. As for cause and effect, quantum physics experiments are providing some interesting results that bring cause and effect into doubt, at least on a very small scale.

In walking I have faith in gravity to pull me forward as I lean forward, and that my leg will have enough strength to stop me when it hits the ground. I have to believe that what I see in front of me is in fact solid and will hold my weight.

Let me assure you, gravity works just as well if you don't have faith in it, flight not withstanding. Same for solid substances (did you know they're mostly empty space?)

Life is not as logical as we would like to believe, and logic itself gets us nowhere without assuming or "having faith" in things.

Absolutely incorrect. Life is logical. People aren't. And logic gets people who use it a lot farther than faith does.

Our lives are mostly experiencial, and we have faith that what worked in the past will continue to work, but that isn't necessarily true. It is reasonable though, and is how all of us live.

It's rather dishonest to equate a reasonable expectation that things will work as they have in the past to the blind belief in a mythology that is logically contradictory and is filled with stories of events that we know didn't happen.

My car generally starts when I go to use it. I'm going out today; somehow if it doesn't start when I expect it to I don't think my worldview will implode.

Ever notice there are two types of drivers? The morons in front of you and the idiots behind you?

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a moron.

- George Carlin

And don't forget Otto West's famous driving word.

I think that the original John Maynard Keynes quote is the best: "In the long run, we're all dead."

More Keynes quotes.

No, seriously. That's the connection. It's the origin of the following quote:

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
-- Linus Torvalds

...don't they kinda wished that they ran linux on it?
and if it where buggy, they'd at least have a patch within a couple of hours ;-)

Yeah, and in a few more hours the community would fracture and there would be 88 competing patches and people going off pissed to make their own rover because "those other guys just don't get it".

Great idea. Next, we can build a camel.

Bush conducted a war in which under ten thousand people were killed.

I guess Stalin was right.

Well Done DVD-Jon

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

There is a beautiful Gallery of CSS descramblers by Dr. David S. Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University).

His site is a gallery devoted to representations of a piece of software that has been deemed illegal because it can be used to break through the copy-protection system on DVD movies.

"It never occurred to me that someone would actually try to prevent people from publishing code that they wrote," he said. "The idea just struck me as so deeply offensive that I felt I had to do something about it."

To make his point about free speech, he offered several exhibits from his gallery, including a description of the DeCSS code in plain English and a T-shirt on which the code was printed -- both of which could be considered illegal under the copyright act.

While proverbs 17:28 does say more or less the same thing, the sig does not quote proverbs 17:28 at all. There was someone else who said that quote exactly. I don't know if it was Abraham Lincoln or not.

Brainyquote.com seems to think it was Abraham Lincoln. Who knows if they are a credible source or not. A bit more searching on google attributes it to George Eliot, Confucious and Mark Twain.

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. "

Thomas Jefferson firmly believed that a revolution every few generations would be necessary to keep the government honest.

I'm sure he would feel we are way overdue.

More quotes from Thomas Jefferson.

This is the OPPOSITE of capitalism.

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?

A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7

We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.

We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?

A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7

We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.

We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?

A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7

We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.

We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?

A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7

We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.

We are not a democracy for chrissakes. When we people learn the difference?

A few links:
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Scary quote #4
Scary quote #5
Quote #6
And from our own government:
Link #7

We are not a democracy. Get it through your head. Democracy is a terrible for mof government where 51% of the people take rights away from the other 49%.

Source here.

-Cyc

Is what he said is 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Quote Here

--
If Microsoft built cars, the Linux community would make a car that was powered
by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, and
available freely - but only 5 percent of the people would use it.
- Fortune

Howard Stern?

H.L. Mencken, though, has the better version: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

When a female genius wins the Nobel prize.

We have equality when a female schlemiel gets promoted to her level of incompetence just as fast as a male schlemiel.

(A slight variant of someone else's quote.)

I'm not sure that the female protagonists in many current movies that make fun of the boys because they can do everything better than them *and* have ripped abs and flawless skin, are exactly a good thing.

Isn't that a bit of an unrealistic standard?

When the state is most corrupt, then the laws are most multiplied.

Tacitus was speaking of a society going into senescence -- it had piled corruption upon corruption under color of law because it simply felt so good to those in power to pass laws.

Something similar is afoot with the idea that you can get better software by reducing labor costs via H-1B visas -- it boils down to a society in which responsibility for one's words is dissappating and being replaced by the same sort of nonsense that ultimately replaced the rule of law in Rome: The word of an Emperor God who had at least shown himself worthy due not to his ablity to manipulate and mince words -- but on the field of battle.

It is far too plausible that the United States is leading technological civilization down a similar path due to the way words have become a medium of manipulation rather than communication. It is to the point now that those who make hiring decisions for software are afraid of Occam's Razor -- for it just may cut their umbilicle chord as well as making code comprehensible, reliable and secure.

Me and a fellow developer worked on a Java client application using netbeans, I would say netbeans is fair in performance, compared to IBM's VisualAge which sucks real bad to the point of discouraging development, but generally all Swing IDEs are slow and unrepsonsive, because Swing is based on AWT, so it is layers and layers of bloat, So far I think the only think Java is good for is server side not desktop applications, imagine developing something like Adobe photoshop using Swing, and netbeans required a hefty 512Mb (my first PC had 640Kb which is suppose to be enough for anyone), I gave up on Java for the desktop long ago until I recently installed the latest version of freenet now those people have totally different concept, launch a local server and use it from the browser and let the browser do all the dirty UI rendering stuff, maybe this is far more limited than the usual felxiable approach of a standalone desktop application but i was impressed by the concept itself.

If its Bezos's job to take advantage of the government due to poor enforcement for as long as he can get away with it,

Bezo has explicitly asked the government for permission to behave this way- and they agreed (that's what the patent application process is).

He's not being sneaky or hiding anything, and thus is "in reality expressing the highest respect for the law". (My apologies to MLK, for slightly twisting his quote. But it's still applicable)

If you'd like to kill some people, then you're free to go to Washington and ask for permission. It may sound like I'm making a joke, but depending on your proposal, they could be quite willing to support you. Maybe you'll even get a gun and ammunition provided! The easiest way to start is by submitting these forms.

> Once upon a time mcrbids doth spoketh ...
> The last item before that spike is the one I buy.
> Notice: hard drives. (pricewatch.com =)
> $49 = 20 GB
> $58 = 30 GB
> $59 = 40 GB (who'd get a 30?)
> $67 = 60 GB
> $77 = 80 GB
> $100 = 100 GB (small spike = 80'd be ok)
> $106 = 120 GB (don't bother with the 100)
> $151 = 160 (Big spike. Go with an 80 or a 120)

Hey thx for the table! You're right about the 80 GB and the 120 GB as being the best buy -- $0.96/Gb, and $0.88/Gb respectively.

> Or, perhaps, AMD CPUs?
> $50 1500 Mhz
> $49 1600 Mhz // here, availability is the issue
> $50 1700 Mhz
> $58 1800 Mhz
> $63 1900 Mhz
> $71 2000 Mhz
> $83 2100 Mhz
> $95 2200 Mhz
> $122 2400 Mhz
> $170 2500 Mhz (Big spike, get a 2200 or 2400)

No, not a 2200 or 2400 !! They suck for overclocking, since the multiplier is too high. The 1700 and the 2100 are the best* CPUs for overclocking currently. Basically you can easily reach the same MHZ as the model number!

Check the scores at: http://www.cpudatabase.com/

*Best = Fantastic performance at a great price if o/c'd. Since a 1700+ can hit over 2 GHz (Air), and 2100+ around 2.2 GHz (Air) !

Cheers

--
The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
- Tacitus, 55-120 AD

Enjoy, if you like quotes.

Corporations can be punished? The whole point of forming one is so you can't be touched.

I've never let my school interfere with my education.

Ah, found the quote: I had the wrong general, it was Sherman.

Here's another quote from Emerson:

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

The internet being the dangerous place that it is

GW? Is that you, calling out to us from the "dark dungeons of the internet"? The internet is not dangerous, unless you count electrocution or eye-strain. The internet is a computer network (actually a network of networks, but who's counting). Your IP (assuming you mean address and not the nebulous "intellectshul propetty") is not private info. It's absolutely essential to the functioning of the network... yes, the bad guys took note that you were poking around... because they figured you were either an easy mark or someone to keep an eye on. Yes, be careful what you do, because you don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention to yourself. That could get you in trouble, both online and off.

As to people being punished for cybercrimes, take a look at someone like Randal Schwartz or Keven Mitnick or Jan Johansen or Dmitry Sklyarov and tell me that people aren't being punished... some of the people I've mentioned probably didn't even commit any real crimes, and the list of people arrested, tried, and convicted for various computer-related crimes is pretty long.

The list of what is taxable and what is not is very complicated. You've got your "sin" taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, which can also vary by ZIP+4 code. Another example (from New York) is that large marshmallows are taxable because they're considered candy, but small marshmallows are non-taxable because they're baking ingredients (it's been a while since I was in retail, I might have gotten it backwards). So you need another lookup table for that.

Your lookup table might be good enough for 99.9% of the items out there. But you'll have some angry customers and zealous prosecutors to remind you when you're wrong.

Perhaps a better idea would be to simply allow the end user to enter the amount of tax due. Give them an online calculator to help them with the math. This is what mail-order houses sometimes do. Yes, it's voluntary, and subject to abuse, and people will get it wrong. However, it is much easier to implement. A bonus feature is that you can start a pool for the date of the first Slashdot story about a site getting hacked by someone entering a negative tax.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. The quote is ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, but originates from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The closest you could probably come to that in the Bible is Romans 13:8 or for the old-school fans, Proberbs 22:7. The bible in general frowns on borrowing or loaning regardless of if usuary is involved or not. Apparently strife caused by the borrowing of tools between people is a timeless theme in humanity.

No. JFK called himself a Jelly Donut.

A "Berliner" is a person from Berlin, while "ein Berliner" is a goop-filled pastry. Kennedy mixed it up.

Churchill said "We are all worms, but I believe I am a glowworm."

Harry S. Truman said "Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day."

I'll make sure not to kick you.

so, first of all, nice stereotype. i guess all the fat, dateless, acne-scarred men on this site need something to chuckle about between visiting sites analyzing spock's deepest thoughts and pron.

and second of all, why would you be so excited about these legions of rednecks using lindows? does nobody here see that computers today are the same as automobiles in the 50s and 60s -- that, back then, it was an elite group of youngsters that really got into the maintenance of and differences between various machines. now mechanics are a dime a dozen, and near the bottom rung of the social ladder, in most places. indeed, they are rednecks. santayana would know what warning to give.

Several from here

`Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.' Hmmm. So in AdeT's view, restricting Gummint to OSS is socialist, but OSS itself is democratic in nature?

He as a word to Microsft as well: `Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.' (-:

Christianity and Science are mutually exclusive.

not all christians reject things like evolution. science has not disproven the existence of a deity.

albert einstein had a positve attitude toward relition and even used to visit christian science churches. i think he qualifies as a scientist, possibly one with deeper insight into science and its nature than all slashdot readers.

Einstein was quoted as saying "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

crap, there went all of my karma. i just admitted to my fellow geeks that i believe in God.

I am not quite sure of your definition of "self-respecting". If one is to truly respect oneself you should do whatever it takes to protect ones physical body. If you feel like you, or whatever son or daughter you wish to send to be killed, will have self-respect by yelling gung ho and going over the hill blind...(It is just not Marine-Like to mess around with those RC car..computer things) go right ahead.

Personally I would prefer to have the most amount of information possible before I entered the surreal very short moments of combat. Combat almost always falls into the military term of "hurry up and wait". Intelligence (knowledge of the enemy) always trumps bravado.

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

General George S. Patton

"God divided by zero--Wright=Comedian">

I apologize in advance for the pop-under ad.