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Well maybe they would be Kill Kittens? A fun little encounter in Arduin.

Damn am I showing my age and ....

http://mrlizard.com/dungeons-and-dragons/dungeons-and-dragons-4th-edition/kill-kittens/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduin

Roll 10 trillion dice. Write down the sequence.

What are the odds of the sequence you just rolled?

One in six^10 trillion.

Since this is so mind-numbingly small a probability, this must mean you didn't roll the dice.

See the flaw in your logic?

For that matter, what are the odds of YOU existing? The sperm which made you was one of millions. The sperm which made each of your parents were likewise one in millions. And your four grandparents. We already at a million in a million in a million chance of you being born. And this is just from the sperm! Ask your parents how they met, and think of all the hundreds of thousands of coincidences which led to them meeting. A missed bus, a minor change of plans, a stubbed toe, any of these things would mean you would not have existed.

But there's six billion people on the planet, each of them the result of a trillion events which each had a one in a trillion chance of occuring.

If there are a trillion star systems in the universe (and there are far more), then, if there is a one in a trillion chance of intelligent life, it will be on one of those systems. Why is it here? Why us? Because it had to be someone. Why one number in the lottery, instead of another? Why one sperm instead of another?

Why are we here? Because we're here. Because if we weren't here, there wouldn't be anyone asking the question.

More on this.

I wrote this in 1996, and not one word needs to be changed:
Voting Rites.

I have no idea whether any of the posters on Slashdot are female, or if they are white or black or Asian. How can I discriminate when I don't have anything at all to go upon?

Exactly! For the past few days, Katz has been acting like folks who read and write here are all one color & one sex. Not only is that not true, the internet allows us to get beyond race and gender in ways humanity has never before done. Take my friend Lizard, for example. I have never seen him, I've only talked with him once, but I respect him because of his words, since I tend to agree with a lot (not all) of them, and I find him funny. That's the beauty of the internet, your words -- and NOT your melanin-content or your family's name or your bank account size or any other bullcrap -- matter. Thoughts, not colors. Someone once had a dream about this kind of a situation, and now it's a reality. Interesting to see who likes and dislikes this reality...

I hate to hurl accusations of racism back and forth, so I'll just say this: Mr. Katz might want to look in the mirror before posting speculative (and false) stuff like this about race or gender and the internet (which is a GOOD thing). There's a reason that many folks like me eschew the politically-correct media these days, and Mr. Katz has just provided an object lesson in why.
JMR
(Speaking only for myself, here.)

Luddites are, basically, parasites, and ought to be denied such things as vaccinations, glasses, sterile medical instruments, and other'complex' things. (Sale, quoted in Katz' article, whines about computers and loves his old manual tyepwriter. Apparently he believes a machine with thousands of precision-engineered moving parts grew on the typewriter tree. Let's see him write his rants with a quill pen.)

Keyword ratings just don't work. If you specify the keywords with too much detail, each web page becomes 10 K of keywords, and 1 K of content. If the list of keywords is not ridgidly fixed, you also end up with "the chicken problem", where a hard core sex site is rated the same as a cooking site, because the both have the keyword "breast". The fact that one of them refers to chicken breasts is not an issue to someone blocking keywords.

If you don't permit enough detail, then things which shouldn't get through do.

For a set of good examples of this, using RSAC to prove the point, see here, but specifically this link, which rates both Alex's Haley's Roots and a pornographic, racist novel using RSACi, and finds that they both have to be given almost the same rating.

Bradley

I really wasn't going to comment on it - everyone else has done a fine job slashing it [uninteded pun?] to ribbons. But ...

I found this to be a bit too much.

D
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Meanwhile, many free market supporters don't believe that "intellectual property" exists in the first place; thus, copyright looks a good deal like government intervention to control people's behavior -- a characteristic we associate with all real-world examples of socialist movements that had political power (not anarchist socialists, though).

Check out what Lizard writes about capitalism to see why communes should be a part of it and copyrights should not.