Slashdot Mirror

Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original.

heh.

It is up to all branches of government to support the constitution. All government officials from all branches, both state and federal, are required to take an oath to support the constitution. It is written into Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

There is a question as whether or not the courts should have power of judicial review. Thomas Jefferson argued that all branches of government should independently interpret the constitution.

"My construction of the Constitution is... that each department is truly independent of the others and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the Constitution in the cases submitted to its action; and especially where it is to act ultimately and without appeal." --Thomas Jefferson

Also, if really quoting from memory, the author deserves some credit, since it's letter-but-not-punctuation perfect for the stanzas quoted, at least according to this source.

(Well, except for two missing lines in this stanza:
O happy living things ! no tongue
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware :
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.)

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.

What would happen if M$ went Open Source?

I'm pretty sure these would form in this place.

The popular vote does not choose a president. The electoral college does.

It was set up by the framers of the consitution this way for a specific reason. So that a very populous state with it's own regional political views cant dominate the federal government. Consider at the time, New York had probably a hundred times the population of the entire western half of the country.

This isnt the first time in which the winner lost the popular vote, but won the election.

Please learn how the system works, then you can criticize it effectively.

The embedded tools version of Microsoft Visual Studio is included free with the eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0 sdk, available from here.

Download MVT 3.0, the PPC 2002 SDK or Smartphone SDK and you have everything for embedded mobile development. Assuming you have a Windows PC on which to install it.

However, I agree it sucks for them to not have a free compiler available for their OS, but I suppose that reflects the focus of their company. Which explains the presense of GCC on Win32 I suppose.

Talking of which, there are a few free compilers for Win32. LCC-Win32, MinGW and DJGPP (for DOS, based on GPP) are particular notables. I think Cygwin includes a port also, amongst the unix toolset.

The Xbox SDK is a subset of the Win32 SDK. Nintendo doesn't publish SDKs for it's gamecube, Sony doesn't publish (full) SDKs for the Playstation (I know the Linux kit contains a few of the docs though). So why should MS publish the Xbox SDK?

(I also believe MS shouldn't stop people from trying to mess with their Xbox, but that's another issue).

The greatest invention of Smalltalk is hype: co-opting and taking credit for other people's inventions.

Simula 67 was the first object-oriented language, and all practical/successful OO languages follow from it: C++, Java, C#, Eiffel, etc. But even Smalltalk experts mistakenly believe that Smalltalk invented OO. Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it.

Similarly, the mouse was invented by Doug Englebart (movie evidence - ) along with the idea of the word processor and many other things we take for granted now. And the GUI was invented by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad: pop-up menus, drag and drop, etc (used a light pen).

Between July 1995 and June 1997, the Yorktown lost propulsion power to
buffer overflows twice while using the new Smart Ship technology, said
Capt. Richard Rushton, commanding officer of the Yorktown at the time
of the failures. But in each incidence the Yorktown crew knew what
caused the failure and quickly restored systems, Rushton said.

No, that's not what he meant.

Now if I could figure out how to use the /. search facility

Forget the slashdot search utility, a google search for "six degrees of bacon" or "oracle of bacon" will take you to The Oracle of Bacon, where you can find the most up-to-date Bacon# for OBL -- or anyone else -- yourself. (It runs a live IMDB search.) Today, the answer is 3.

BTW, I should give credit to the Onion [theonion.com] for my sig.

Funny, that's what I said when I saw it. :)

Abuse of the freedoms result in thier loss.

Really? I thought some of them were supposed to be Inalienable Rights.

_ALL_ Sun servers are very stable, but slow. SPARC speed is poor, take a look at SPEC CPU2000 Results. The memory bandwidthis _very_ low. In Linpack-top500 you won't see SUN in the 100 first places.

The Fujitsu SPARC64 V is better chip and 100% compatible with SUN solaris/SPARC. And better servers with 128 CPUs !!!!

LiNUX is a better alternative below 8 CPUs: Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux and Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux, Part 2. LiNUX+x86/ia64 , and soon AMD x86-64, is cheaper and faster than Solaris/SPARC

DEC/Compaq/HP have the best chip (Alpha EV7) and the best UNIX servers (ES47,ES80,GS1280) in RISC arch. It's a pity that Alpha is going to die to put intel ia64 instead.

And if you need NUMA machine, SGI Altix is for you.

Why do you need to buy a SUN server?

But the thing is probably that micro$oft said this thing would be impossible since winxp is so secure. Whatever.

Ciryon

_ALL_ Sun servers are very stable, but slow. SPARC speed is poor, take a look at SPEC CPU2000 Results. The memory bandwidth is _very_ low. In Linpack-top500 you won't see SUN in the 100 first places.

The Fujitsu SPARC64 V is better chip and 100% compatible with SUN solaris/SPARC. And better servers with 128 CPUs !!!!

LiNUX is a better alternative below 8 CPUs: Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux and Migrating Oracle9i - Based Sun Servers to Dell Servers Running Linux, Part 2. LiNUX+x86/ia64 , and soon AMD x86-64, is cheaper and faster than Solaris/SPARC

DEC/Compaq/HP have the best chip(Alpha EV7) and the best UNIX servers (ES47,ES80,GS1280) in RISC arch. It's a pity that Alpha is going to die to put intel ia64 instead.

And if you need NUMA machine, SGI Altix is for you.

Why do you need to buy a SUN server?
- because my programs _only_ run with solaris/sparc

• Stuff the new capabilities into the original software anyplace they'll fit. This created Unix variants like Linux (and Solaris, and the others that are still maintained). The code may be a mishmash, but new features are provided, and direct backwards compatibility wasn't sacrificed.
  
• Toss out the old design and create something new which includes all the desired features from the beginning. This is what the elgance-minded inventors of Unix did, but the change was so drastic that it would've required legions of existing users to re-engineer their systems. Today, nobody uses the result.
  

I wonder if this material could be used to make a better version of blackface?

Here's a couple of examples of networks that exhibit a scale-free topology.

1. WikiWiki.

   This shows that Wiki sites are characterized by the Pareto distribution (a.k.a. power law distribution).

2. RPM dependency graphs.

   Out of curiousity, I wrote a quick script to compute the distribution of the number of links in the RPM dependency graph. It does seem to follow the Pareto distribution.

3. Slashdot

   Although I have no easy way of verifying this, my gut feeling is that the network of Slashdot users is also scale-free, if we define the notion of a link between two users as follows. User bobdc is linked to user bugbear, if bobdc has replied to any of bugbear's post (or submissions) at least once.

   This definition allows us to introduce the notion of a CmdrTaco number, similar to the Kevin Bacon number. Specifically, user Joe Schmoe has the CmdrTaco number of 1, if CmdrTaco has replied to any of Joe's comments. If Joe responded to wuliao's post, then wuliao has the CmdrTaco number of no greater than 2, and so on.

Pareto distributions are pretty common. For example, the number of downloads on SourceForge follows the Pareto distribution.

This page provides a fairly comprehensive list of further reading on the subject.

The loss of Mt. Stromlo Observatory facility is very great loss.

A number of the obvious sites related to Stromlo are down, due to the fire or due to the wide spread power outages in the area. I will make links to indirect and cached pages.

Established in 1924, the Commonwealth Observatory at Mount Stromlo, on the outskirts of Canberra. Commonwealth Observatory was recognized for its important research into the origin and future of the universe.

Astronomers at Mount Stromlo made outstanding contributions to astronomy. It would be difficult to list all of the important contributions to Astronomy made by the people working at Mt. Stromlo. Now, a few come to mind:

• Stromlo research in the 1950s provided the first clue that the Magellanic Clouds had evolved differently from our own galaxy. These results gave us important insights into galactic evolution.
• In the 1990's, astronomers from Stromlo and Sliding Springs (many km away from the fire area) showed that about 90% of disc galaxies (such as our own) are greatly influenced by ''dark matter'', in their galaxies' halos.
• They made important observations in the first hours after Supernova 1987A (the first naked eye supernova in several centuries of years) was discovered.
• Then there is the sort of work such as the Stromlo Abell Cluster Supernova Search
• The Massive Compact Halo Objects (Macho project that was the first to record many microlensing events in our Galaxy as well as in the LMC.
• Then there was all of that tedious, but vital work of spectral classification of southern stars.
• Many of the first parallax distances to Southern stars were first made at Stromlo.
• The list goes on and on ... I am sorry that I must leave out so many other significant contributions!

One of the principal instruments at Stromlo was the 74-inch (188-cm) reflecting telescope. The 74-inch telescope was erected in 1953, and until the completion in 1974 of the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring, this was the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. In 1982, it was used to discover the fossil star CD-38245: a star so old that it is made almost purely of gases left over from the big bang.

It also was home scopes such as the robotic 50-inch (127-cm). It was an excellent example of how an older telescope could be outfitted with new controls and instruments to perform innovative work. The MACHO project was conducted on the 50 inch.

Two historical scopes come to mind, the Oddie, and the Yale-Columbia telescope:

The Oddie, was a wonderful 9-inch Newtonian telescope. The Victorian MP, James Oddie, presented this telescope to the Commonwealth government for use in the proposed Commonwealth Observatory. It was installed on the site at "Mt Strom" (as Stromlo was originally known) in September 1911. Over the years the Oddie telescope has made valuable contributions to Southern Hemisphere astronomy; it did some of the first measurements of the brightness, color and spectral classification of southern stars.

The Yale-Columbia telescope, 26-inch Grubb long-focus refractor was erected at this site for the determination of parallaxes of southern stars (it was the largest refractor in the southern hemisphere when first installed.

Moreover, there were other scopes as well ... But alas, from what can be seen from the air at this time, most, if not all of those telescopes have been lost. At appears that heat from the burning of the nearby bush /trees was hot enough to melt many of the domes at the observatory.

The Canberra Astronomical Society used the Stromlo lecture hall for their monthly meetings. During public nights, the public had access to a domed C14 scope, the Oddie, and a number of scopes brought to the site by members ... all through the hard work and generous efforts of the Canberra Astronomical Society.

I had the privilege of observing at Mt Stromlo several times and spoke at one of the CAS meetings. I still can recall flying down from the US to a CAS member's home to see SN1987, . I was there only 36 hours after the naked eye supernova was first observed. I still recall seeing the single star, at a distance of over 168,000 light-years, change in color and rightness over the course of an evening. I was one of the most important astronomical events I have had the honor to witness. I recall that every scope up at Mt Stromlo was all pointed at the Large Magellanic Could where SN 1987A was blazing away. The previous observing board schedule was cancelled as people raced to collect as much early critical data as they could in the early hours of the event.

I had the privilege of being with the members of the Canberra Astronomical Society on two of my several total solar eclipses: 1991 in Hawaii, US and most recently the 2001 eclipse in Ceduna, AU.

(Both trips count among my several successful viewings of solar totality. Although the 1991 Hawaii was a close call that was saved because my friend (the one who introduced me to the CAS) broke his arm a very short time before the Eclipse ... which allowed both of us to have a full view of Totality in Hawaii ... but that is another story!)

My best wishes and heart felt sorrow go out to all of those people who worked so hard to make Mt. Stromlo such a wonderful place for the public to visit and who helped the observatory make many important contributions to Astronomy. Much of what was lost cannot be replaced. Still it is my hope that those who are left will be able to rebuild something anew out this tragedy.

I hope to heck that some idiot Congressman trying to put together a family tree photo album is told that at some point in the near future: "no, I can't copy your old family pictures since the right to copy them belongs to the photographer." This includes school photos, wedding photos, and all that sort of stuff. So now, you have to wait for the photographer to die, then wait another 70 years before you own pictures of yourself and your loved ones. This law is not only unconstitutional (I'm with Breyer and Stevens on this one) but morally bankrupt from the get go. Why should copyright last well over 100 years, and patents only 20?

An excellent point. This Christmas - my mom got my sister and I each copies of our childhood "Santa pictures" via the photo-copiers at Wal-Mart. A few of them were from a Richmond department store that closed in 1990. Wal-Mart wouldn't let her copy those photographs, because she didn't hold the copyright to them.

Is that the benefit of copyright law? You can't reproduce pictures of your own family taken by a defunct business? I'm glad our government is looking out for us.

The word 'hoover' is commonly used as a verb in England, as in "I'm going to hoover the carpet." Windex is another good example, if not quite so common. I think the poster was mistaken about Kleenex. I've never heard it used as a verb, but I have heard it used to describe non-Kleenex tissues.

An interesting thread regarding the subject is available over at the Humanist Archives. They mention how a company can lose it's trademark if the trademarked term is used commonly to refer to things other than the product intended for it. Aspirin, for example, was once a trademarked word. Xerox is another term that has been in danger of losing it's trademark - so much so that the company waged an advertising campaign to dissuade people from using the term to describe anything other that the company itself or it's products. That is, it's a Xerox copy, not simply a xerox -- according to them.

And somewhat more topically, I googled for "verb kleenex hoover" and the above link was top of the list.

The first 20 are hard enough to learn. I never learned them, but my biochem roommate did and if he had told me the structure of valine one more time I was going to kill him.

What's the use of it? Well, imagine getting a whole new shape of Lego piece to design around.

I am not a doctor, but isn't urokinase produced by the kidneys ?

If so, we can assume the kidneys have great concentrations of it, and this Anthrax treatment could harm the kidneys, leading to kidneys failure. Not so good, IMO.

That's because she was a salesperson--not an engineer (or systems administrator or help-desk troglodyte)--before becoming CEO. The average chick in CS (or "IT" as you put it) is more like Mary Shaw, Judy Estrin or Anita Jones than Fiorina.

This is just one of the many outward metrics of the US culture's current decadent state: we deride or fear intellectualism, curiosity (about anything other than sex and drugs), and right action. We exalt immediate gratification, hyper cunsumption, and superficiality.

See Democracy in America for its prophetic passages imagining the inevitable triumph of mediocrity allowed by democratic capitalism's short term thinking. You can make more money and gain more political power by playing to the lowest common denominator than you can by trying to raise it.

How 'bout:
B&N Free MS Reader eBooks

University of Virginia's eBook Library for the MS Reader

That sounds pretty interesting although I'm not the kind of person who would use that kind of setup.

However, when I lived in Japan my killer app was this Japanese/English Dictionary Server with a simple i-mode interface.

This helped me out a countless number of times and any phone that can browse the web can use it.

- akamichi

That sounds pretty interesting although I'm not the kind of person who would use that kind of setup.

However, when I lived in Japan my killer app was this Japanese/English Dictionary Server with a simple i-mode interface.

This helped me out a countless number of times and any phone that can browse the web can use it.

- akamichi

First them scientist claim that man is decended from monkeys. Now they think that everything is made out of shoestrings. Hope she is right...

Hey mister nit pick. Do you live in your mother's basement?

there is no place for ego (and insults) in a scientific argument...

You said it all by yourself.

To start off, take this statement from a reply post: I think that treating this as a kinetics problem is somewhat oversimplifying the situation. Subatomic particles don't hit cells in the same way that a hammer would

I completely agree. Reread the last paragraph of my post. I don't know how to calculate properly the amount of energy released by such a particle when going through the body, but I do know that the way you did it is wrong.

The quark has the possibility of not touching you at all while passing through you... just like neutrinos can fly through the earth without ever touching anything... So the effect of this quark going through your body is most likely going to be to leave a disturbance trail - massive vibrations most likely... not a puncture hole.

Perhaps, perhaps not. You're not backing up what you're saying... When you say that something is going to happen "most likely", it either needs to be very obvious, or you need to back it up with calculations. I was talking about a puncture hole because that's what I thought you were thinking. I apologize if I was wrong.

The point you probably didn't understand about the purely formal equation f'(x) = df/dx is that using the argument that something is very small doesn't mean it won't do any damage.

No, I understand the point you're making perfectly. You're even right. The problem is that it's a bad analogy. You're using something that appears to be clever to prove an obvious point. You don't need calculus to make a point about something small being able to do massive damage... It's pretty obvious. I showed, via calculations, that if the model of this event (quark going through human body) is puncture hole, then the amount of energy released is going to be very small.

You are plain wrong. Something traveling at the speed of light which has a mass must expend an infinite amount of energy to get to that speed. If it is at the speed of light, it must have zero mass (not infinite).

True, but you're talking about rest mass, not mass. I was talking about (actual) mass. Photons, by the way, do have mass, but no rest mass. See this.

Actually, there were a couple of Elm releases/updates in 2000 and later that included fixes for some of the Y2K problems.

Latest version is available from:

ftp://ftp.virginia.edu/pub/elm/elm2.5.6.tar.gz

It's dated August 8, 2001.

Here's some online comics that might be worth checking out:

Sluggy - Students, aliens, ghosts, psychotic rabbits, evil kittens. One of the oldest and niftiest comics online.
User Friendly - Linux, geeks. You get the idea.
Megatokyo - An online manga following Piro and Largo whilst stranded in Tokyo.
Schlock Mercenary - Not too good art, but usually a very good and suitably sci-fi-ish plot.
Clan of the Cats - A modern-day witch cursed to change into a panther. Good artwork.
RPG World - Great art. A parody of almost any role playing game (the console variety) you'd care to play.
Ghost Cat - It's a cat! It's a ghost! It's ghost cat!
Elf Life - Elves, fairies, barbarians, time travel, romance, comedy, and very well drawn as well.
Exploitation Now! - An anime-ish comic with good art and an interesting, if sporadic, plot.
Real Life - It's real life. Except it's not. Reasonably funny.
Penny Arcade - The mother of all gaming comics. Very funny :)
Sephen - A relative newcomer, but wow! Great pencil-work!
8-bit Theater - The grandpappy of all sprite comics. I think. It's funny anyway. Go read :)
Demonology 101 - Fantastic art, fantastic plot! If only it came out more often! Ah well, the world isn't perfect.

Oh, and I can't really get away without mentioning my brother's sprite comic, Pixelated!. It really isn't bad. No, really! :)

Is our own bodies.

I'm studying to be a bioinformatics guy with the university of melbourne and have just had the misfortune of looking into the enzymatic reactions that control oxygen based metabolism in the human body.

I tried to do a worst case complexity analysis and gave up about half way through the krebs cycle.

When you think about it, most of basic science, some religeon and all of medicine has been about removing layers of abstraction to try and fix things when they go wrong.

This is from:

http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~jh8h/Foundatio ns /chapter3.html

Newton delayed publishing his results in part because he was forced to invent calculus in order to work out the results for the gravitational attraction of two extended bodies.

He toyed with the idea that the interaction between the earth & the apple can be treated as the interaction between two point particles. To prove this he had to invent a formalism to add up the contribution to the interaction of different pieces of the earth at varying distances from the apple -- (integral) calculus

OK... The FBI may or may not be bugging libraries. The FBI is closely in alliance with the Secret Service. The Secret Service is run by the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department is run by Paul O'Neil, who used to run Alcoa. Alcoa is the largest producer in the world of Tin Foil.

Umm, where does Kevin Bacon fit in?

These days, non-sexist language is preferred. At least, if you don't want Douglas Hofstadter to write a hilarious essay mocking you.

You're half-right.

On the one hand, focus is the issue here. Focus is very important, and i myself HATE when the CGI looks like CGI because it's too in focus.

BUT, as someone who's done a few high-quality computer animated shorts, there's a large amount of work that goes into, and a significant number of applications to help with, post-processing effects, such as blur and focus and color temperature. It's fundamentally a very hard problem. For color and lighting, Paul Debevec has been doing a lot of new and interesting things to use real-world lighting to light computer models, and computer lighting to light real people. As for blur and focus, i'm not sure of any really good algorithms or techniques, but in practice, it's largely all hand-tweaked, which is bound to be imperfect.

It's easy to say that "damn CGI artists don't know what the word 'focus' means," but when you take a good look at the problem, it's hardly that trivial.

ben.c

This whole thread seems a bit offtopic, but to humour those in it...
Alaska wasn't actually a province, Canada lost out when the failed to buy it from the Russians, who sold it in 1867 (though it didn't become a state until 1959).

Look up "Seward's Folly" on google for more info.

It's always seemed somewhat odd having a American state attached on the northwestern borders, far from the rest of the US, but this page seems to cover most of the details

Since democracies have started people have pointed out the flaws in the voting system. One specific critique was done by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carrol) which talked about the British system. Unfortunately, it was ignored.

The University of Virginia, has been working with the Lewis Carrol Society of North America to print his many works (up to 3 of 9 last I checked). The third book, which is mathematical approach to politics, is availible here and here.

Correct you are. All I can think was I was thinking Esdras and got thrown off by what I was responding to... yeah, that's the ticket...

'King James Version .... For example, '"Esther" is omitted (yes, I'm serious).'

Actually, Esther was in the original King James Version of the Bible. The 14 books of the Apocrypha were officially removed in 1885. See, e.g., this google search.

Sounds like virginia.edu to me.

In the 1870s, Bell competed with another inventor, Elisha Gray who also worked on a version of an improved telephone. Both men allegedly rushed their respective designs to the patent office the same day and Bell won the footrace.

Being first to the patent office wasn't the only reason Bell got the patent. Alex Bell had a finished patent on a working invention, while Elisha Gray had at that time only a "caveat", an outline of the invention without a working model. (Caveat is apparently Latin for "vapourware".)

Insult my credentials. The first refuge of an incompetant, hide-bound, traditionalist. For your information, I wasn't the one who said the college is Club Med for the young. Rather, it was Mark Edmundson, Professor of English, from the University of Virginia. His essay is interesting and can be found here. Maybe he considers himself a teacher at a 'party school,' I doubt it.

But really, I could hardly expect more of someone who went to college to learn how to monkey with computers rather than learn a real subject. Whenever I pick up one of the various journals on algorithmic complexity for a lark, it depresses me to see what passes for mathematics in the the field of computer science. In reality, the only reason computer science exists at all, is because corporations needed more people to run computers than were smart enough to pass the mathematics courses. Even the name suggests an inferiority complex. You have to tack on the science word at the end or nobody will believe you.

Raise your critical thinking skills. Teach you how to learn. Interact with experts. Help you grow.

That is repeated again and again without any evidence ever given to back it up. The degree farms that we call universities--and no I'm not talking about 'party schools'--don't do a great deal more for critical thinking skills than any other option that a young person can choose at that stage in life. And in many ways it does less. I've been challenged by many people in my life, whether they happen to be a professor, a employeer, a friend, or a lover.

You can teach a monkey C. It's a lot harder to teach people how to think, analyze, adapt, and overcome.

Which could explain why colleges are so terrible at it. In fact, they aren't even great at the former. Thinking, analyzing, and adapting are all things learned from living. The temporary refuges from the outside world that most colleges set up do more to hold back than push forward.

Tell me. When you want to hire someone. How do you judge their critical thinking skills? Do you just read the name in the section of the resume labelled Education?

First off, Kevin Bacon must have a part in this movie. Doesn't matter what part, but a part he must have. Specific recommendations are:
The Rock or Russell Crowe to play Shawn Fanning (depending on whether you want an outrageous super-hero or a more realistic, though tough-as-nails hero), Sir Anthony Hopkins in a Lector-like role should play the leading RIAA character. I think that Vin Diesel should also have a role - reprising his character in _Pitch Black_.


Yeah, just what we need, more actors and films that Kevin Bacon will have some degree with :P

They're going to be soooo expensive.

Reminds me of an old Spitting Image sketch featuring a puppet of Alexander Graham Bell and his mum. Went something like this..

*Phone Rings*
Mum: Hello, '2'. (quoting her phone number)
AGB: (disguising voice) Hello lady, what colour knickers you got on?
Mum: Alexander, I know that's you!

Made me laugh anyway.

Apparently he should have installed 37 operating systems, instead of walking on water, healing people physically, saving them from sin, and rising from the dead.

Of course, he often is mentioned on slashdot, even aside from his mention by you... see these articles or comments.

See Matthew 25:34-40 for another thought or perspective, too.

Of course, you probably meant interviewed, which is something else entirely...

OK, I read the article again.

Even more interesting, the ones I picked out as gedanken experiments were ranked 1 and 2.

The passage I remembered from Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences has been thoughtfully excerpted and placed online.

"Olde English," technically, has absolutely nothing to do with the examples you give. Those are merely now-obscure (or cute, depending on your perspective) variations on the English that modern speakers know.

If you'd like to see what Old English really looks like, you could have a gander at Beowulf . As I'm sure you'll realize very quickly, fluency in Modern English doesn't really help much when trying to read Old English. It may as well be a different language.

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales , written in Middle English, is usually considered to be one of the earliest English works still available that untrained modern readers have a chance at understanding. It's a bit closer to your "Olde English," but it's still a far cry from the minor spelling variations that you cited. (Did you know that "ye" is merely a pre-18th century spelling of "the," and was pronounced more or less the same way it is today?)

Actually, for my faith, there is no need for a meta belief to tell me that. My faith calls for volunteers, only. Thus, forcing my beliefs on others is generally pointless.

An exception to that would be the Islamicist fanatics, who believe that the Koran requires them to kill unbelievers (Jews who don't follow the law, including Christians, and Muslims who have left their faith.). It is perfectly in accord with my faith for my government to impose upon them my belief that they must not ACT on their belief.

(After all, if your religion says that it's good to force your beliefs on others, to what can you refer to justify *not* doing so?)

That's an excellent point. The Koran DOES call upon its believers to kill unbelievers, at least in the English translation ( don't have a citation at hand, but you'll find examples here, in the first few chapters at least). If you call yourself a Muslim, and don't follow Allah's word, are you a good Muslim? This whole mess probably seems confusing, and seems to require meta-religion, if you believe that all religions are equally valid.

I don't believe that all religions are equal, and I believe that where others deviate from my beliefs, they are wrong. That certainly doesn't mean that it would be right for me (or you!) to do any sort of harm to those who believe in them. At best, persecution would be counter-productive.

I know that people who called themselves Christians have used their religion to justify all sorts of nastiness. You won't find any justification to hate or harm any person in the new testament. You can't say that about the portions of the Koran I've read. If you read the Gospels, you'll find an incident in which one of Jesus's enemies asked him what was the most important of the commandments. Jesus's reply was: ``Love God, and love your neighbor. This is the law and the prophets.'' That pretty well sums up Christianity. God loves you, and he expects me to, also. Even if I don't like you, even if you're wrong.