I was under the impression that with intellectual property, if you were aware of a violation you HAD to pursue its resolution immediately, or else risk foregoing legal protections. The point of which is to prevent just what's being suggested here--waiting for a technology to become widespread specifically in order to profit more from the eventual suit. Am I missing something here? Any IP lawyers want to chime in on how this could be legit?
Not in the traditional sense. One of the main characteristics of a rhetorical question is that the questioner does not want or expect it to be answered. It's hard to find useful references for this kind of thing on the internet, but the following might be of interest:
The last one gives the best explanation of when you would want to consider punctuation other than a question mark. In any case, it's generally considered perfectly acceptable to do so.
I mean really why do people put up with this? It's almost as if people are too lazy to defend their privacy and too eager to whine about their problems or something.
That's easy. The companies will do whatever they want as long as people continue to pay for it. You want to stop stuff like this? You're going to have to convince a lot of people it's worth giving up TV over. Good luck with that, I've seen what the priorities of the average American are.
You misread my statement. I never claimed a belief in god, and in fact have none. I assume no such thing, nor do I need to in order to argue that science and logic do not preclude the possibility of a god, so long as that possibility is approached from a rational standpoint. A traditional Abrahamic God (or so-called "Intelligent Designer"), however, is no such thing.
And I don't think Taoism is a celebration of mystery, but more of trying to resolve the mystery.
The beginning of the Tao Te Ching as follows (most familiar translation immediate Googling returned):
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
When I've read it, it's always seemed to be very much a celebration of mystery to me. I've always found the religious aspects I've observed manage to retain this.
The nature of the universe, as we currently understand it, naturally leads to the question of origins. That is to say more specifically, time seems to have had an origin at some distinct point in the past. Beyond that, however, it's all speculation. Perhaps it all came from something of similar enough character to indeed beg the question, where did that come from. Perhaps it came from nothing at all (although that's an idea you'd have to spend some time unpacking to make any sense of). Perhaps it came from something of a character such that questions of origin no longer sensibly apply.
But that's all totally beside the point. The question here is where did this world (I avoid the use of "universe" because it has troublesome implications) come from. Maybe it sprung into being ex nihilo. Maybe it was the result of some unimaginable higher level of unthinking natural process. Maybe it was the will of a creator. The problem with "turtles all the way down" is that criticism applies to any explanation other than ex nihilo spontaneous creation (which is its own can of worms). All we know right now is that, by all appearances, it did seemingly spring into being at a distinct point in the distant past, and are left pondering the question of how.
And I don't know why you said "your god." I'm fairly sure I never claimed to believe in any such thing.
First, I think you and I are using very different definitions of "to reconcile." As you say:
That is why science and religion are irreconcilable: science is solely about what is real and religion is indistinguishable from make-believe.
Whether or not I agree with this characterization, what that says to me seems to be precisely the opposite of what you claim it is. One deals with "the real" and the other with "the unreal." As long as you don't try to impose one on the other (make religious claims about the real or scientific claims about the unreal), then the two are effectively reconciled.
I will say this though: I believe you are restricting the set of things to which you are allowing the property of "real" much more than science will allow for. It seems that you are claim that science as a whole is both ultimately complete and consistent. It is a very involved argument, but I submit in brief that this is contrary to Godel's incompleteness theorem, which I likewise submit can be applied to science as a whole. Science strives for consistency and in doing so abandons all hope for ultimate completeness. The detail of this argument, and exactly how it applies to theories of religion and the supernatural, is really FAR beyond the scope of what can be accomplished in a/. thread, but I invite you to investigate this theorem (Google "Godel incompleteness" for a start, assuming you aren't already familiar with it) and am certainly open to email discourse regarding its application in this matter.
Religion and science certainly are reconcilable, because their problem domains, you might say, are orthogonal when properly addressed. It's only when one encroaches onto the other's territory, so to speak, that they become otherwise. This, I think, really gets to the heart of the problem and, I'll agree with you, what I dislike about Dawkins.
You seem to be defining religion rather narrowly from the traditional Abrahamic mindset, and from that mindset religion often does conflict with science. Take a religion from the opposite end of the spectrum though, for example, Taoism. Taoism has much more in common with what you have called "Spiritualism" (a bad word to use considering that has distinct unscientific connotations; to be truthful it is not clear, from an academic standpoint, what the intended referent of "Spiritualism" is as you have used it). Keep in mind, of course, that Taoism is very much considered a religion, but it is also very much simply a celebration of mystery.
Now, I'll make one point about a very scientific concern where religion has weight and is not necessarily "at odds" with science--cosmology. To put it somewhat crudely, religion is as good an explanation as anything regarding the ultimate origin of existence. In fact, it is much stronger than many so-called "scientific" explanations (e.g. many-worlds theories which seek to account for the origin of existence, but ultimately only expand the problem domain by failing to deal with "ultimate existence" per se and simply considering a panoply of independent manifestations--begging the question as it were). To be simple, when one asks the question, "Where does it all, ultimately, come from?" or likewise "Why is there something rather than nothing?" there is nothing wrong or unscientific about saying "God," although you might hope for a fuller and more considered accounting of this answer. This is because the question itself, arguably, is outside the realm of science (a claim for which the argument is an entirely separate line of thought that I could expand on if you wish).
The problem you and Dawkins have is when religion attempts to dictate facts about the mundane world. How did such and such arise? What is the nature of this process over here? How does this object behave? These questions are fundamentally the domain of science--as are all questions regarding the operation of the universe. As such, these are the places where religion goes astray and becomes incompatible with science when it tries to assert its weight. It is important to note, however, that religion need not address these questions, and in fact many do not.
I'm brought back to the thought with which I opened this post: religion and science deal with fundamentally different problem domains. There are questions with which, given the very definition of science, science can not deal (think Godel's first incompleteness theorem as a logical illustration of how this can be the case). Likewise, there are questions with which faith has no business dealing.
Disclaimer: I am not religions, though I consider myself something of a student of these matters who enjoys some small smattering academic background in such studies. You might call me agnostic, although I don't know whether that's entirely accurate either.
When I have had the opportunity to watch him talk or debate, I have not noticed the careful qualification of his statements that you refer to. I think sometimes this is a result of him debating somebody who is such an extremist that he perhaps takes for granted that we will assume his statements are only intended for that particular sort, but he has always come across (to me at least) as painting religion in overly broad swathes.
To be honest, and this is entirely subjective on my part, I have always found him to come across as excessively arrogant in his own intelligence, which regardless of its truth comes across as distasteful. He's one of those people with whom I may agree on some fundamental levels, but have always found his combative methods excessive. I honestly think he makes more enemies for the cause of rational thought than he does friends.
I guess what he really seems to want--and again I should qualify that this is how it seems to me--is to demonstrate that science and religion are irreconcilable, which is simply untrue. Perhaps this is not the fact of the matter, and perhaps he is perfectly accepting of rational theology, but that is the impression I have gotten having seen him speaking and debating a few times without having extensively researched his position.
Science isn't really what the issue here is; religious dogma and zealotry is. Sadly, experience tells us the only way these people will ever even grudgingly accept the fault of their convictions is under the overwhelming weight of history.
That aside, what we need to be fighting is not the public misperceptions regarding science, but rather the startling tendency towards dogmatic adherence to religious creed in this country. No matter how brilliantly, concisely, clearly, and interestingly you present the scientific facts, they will hold no sway over one who is utterly and dogmatically committed to a diametrically contrary belief.
In short, what we need to be teaching is not science, but its underpinnings--rational thought and analysis. Until people learn to willingly employ those there truly is no hope.
Nonsense, Dawkins is exceedingly smart. What he doesn't have is extensive training in the philosophy of religion, which causes him to make statements that sometimes woefully misrepresent the religious perspective. What Dawkins is, however, is an evolutionary biologist, so you can somewhat understand his ardor in fighting against anti-evolutionary religious zealotry.
I don't think we really need a legal precedent to deal with the corporate world in this way. We've already got a functional precedent, which is: violate the GPL--get forced to settle for an undisclosed (large) sum of money. That's what the business world cares about, and that probably means more than any legal ruling ever would when it comes down to it.
So, this Larrabee, will it be another example of integrated graphics that "supports" all the standards while being too slow to be useful in any practical situation, even basic desktop acceleration (Composite / Aero)? If so, I've gotta wonder why they even bother rather than saving some cash and just making a solid 2D accelerator that would be for all intents and purposes functionally identical.
running a program on someone else's computer is trespass
I'll admit that this makes sense on a sort of intuitive level, but do you have any references you could point to that indicate that this has been positively treated in precedent? I know clearly it would be trespass to physically trespass in order to use the computer, but can you point me to any decisions that indicate it is specifically considered trespass (as opposed to something else) to access another's computer without authorization? I'm genuinely curious, as I am not familiar with any (not that that means anything).
1) America didn't really receive any 'embrace' after 9/11. The rest of the world either suspected it was an inside job, or felt you had it coming.. There were very few people who truly believed the official version of events.. Which leads into..
I'm sorry, but that's not even remotely true. Once we started flinging bombs around, sure the rest of the world wasn't feeling so sorry for us anymore, but immediately after 9/11 we certainly DID see a lot of support coming from around the world before Bush squandered it. Do a little research and maybe you won't come off as quite such an ass?
Even WIKIPEDIA could have saved you from looking a fool:
France's Le Monde newspaper summing up the international mood of sympathy: "We Are All Americans" (Nous sommes tous Américains)
Look more for further evidence if you want. The only "rest of the world" that "felt we had it coming" were people who were already our enemies. Gee big surprise there, eh? Sure, the US has been something of a global troublemaker for a while now, but it's either ignorant or disingenuous to assert that the entire rest of the world thought we got what we deserved that day. Or do you just have that short a memory? Sorry pal, we had the world's sympathy, and we took a big shit on it.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "wrapper" in this context. To use aspell, all an application needs to do is link to libaspell.so, which provides spell checking services and already is the one common wrapper that every application calls. Beyond that, I guess you could automatically spell check common GTK widgets (check out the gtk-spell package for that), but any custom built text interfaces will have to have some kind of custom wrapper around whatever library they use anyway.
Why would it need to when there are perfectly good, widely used, third party spell checkers available (aspell)? Tell me, exactly, what the point would be in integrating it with a desktop environment, where this functionality is clearly not specific to that environment (many console programs use spell checking as well), other than to bloat that environment.
As my wonderful Grandmother (she'd beat me for calling her that, she's my Nan) has always said when questioned about her unwavering belief in the Christ God, she would rather believe and be wrong, than not believe and be wrong.
That can be a dangerous attitude. It's pretty widely agreed that the people who believed in the Crusades and the Inquisition were wrong. At least they had a belief and stuck to it though, eh? As for me, either give me proof or I will simply reserve my judgment. If God can't deal with that kind of attitude, then maybe he's not the kinda bloke I want to spending eternity with anyway. Especially when you consider the frequent consequences of unfounded dogmatic belief.
Despite complaints otherwise, these answers were not entirely content free. Clearly, in many cases they were worked over EXTENSIVELY by PR people to remove any information of a sensitive nature; both politically sensitive, as well militarily. While I certainly think they have no business censoring information because of political sensitivity (an act that works against the very foundations of a democratic society, so I find it rather offensive), that's not to say that NOTHING came though.
Some things I think I came away with:
- Overall, he seems willing to pursue candidates who might otherwise have not been "military material."
- They seem to be setting up a framework of SOME sort under which multiple intelligence agencies are able to cooperate effectively. According to my understanding, this is a drastic departure from the current state of affairs.
- They WILL be dealing with domestic targets, if only in cooperation with other domestic law enforcement bodies. This was the impression I got from their answers, but it might be reading too far into it (though I doubt it).
- Assuming the former is true, they are going to try to do an end run around domestic and civilian cyber law. The sense I got from the evasiveness (reading into what he avoided answering), was that they have no intention of abiding by the same laws that civilians and domestic law enforcement are forced to obey. My guess is it's going to be more of the same, "this is national security, those laws don't apply to us," bullshit we've been seeing for the last 8 years out of the painfully fascist leanings of the current powers that be.
While I often read too much into what isn't said, the real impression I'm getting is that they're going to try to parlay the military nature of this new cyber command into an excuse to avoid obeying the current legal restrictions faced by domestic agencies. If you thought this whole fiasco with AT&T was bad, just wait until the military gets their fingers in the cookie jar. (BEWARE the goddamn military-industrial complex. I may sound paranoid, but that's the greatest danger out there to our freedom.)
"Dollar-votes" doesn't really make sense in the context of a paid-for and a free alternative. On those grounds Linux loses by default. To put it another way, even had they started with Linux and never used Windows, it still wouldn't have gotten a "dollar-vote." Or another way, had Linux cost money then both platforms would have gotten the "dollar vote." What really matters here is market share, and on that front, Linux is what won in the end.
Maybe this is just me, but I'm pretty sure that deliberately halting development on your product is one of the best ways to sabotage its compatibility with future developments in the field. For people who aren't interested in splitting hairs, a choice to halt development is for all intents and purposes a CHOICE to avoid compatibility.
You claim that they "delivered" on a call for improved standards support, but if the page linked in this article is to be believed, that simply isn't the case. Judging by the abysmal score linked in the summary, MS has done very little to improve overall standards compatibility. My guess, although somewhat naive from being based only on these numbers, is that all they did was fix the special cases that would allow them to pass Acid2, the fact of which is revealed by Acid3.
Slashdot Mirror
Novell's legal team needs to hire better proofreaders.
I was under the impression that with intellectual property, if you were aware of a violation you HAD to pursue its resolution immediately, or else risk foregoing legal protections. The point of which is to prevent just what's being suggested here--waiting for a technology to become widespread specifically in order to profit more from the eventual suit. Am I missing something here? Any IP lawyers want to chime in on how this could be legit?
Not in the traditional sense. One of the main characteristics of a rhetorical question is that the questioner does not want or expect it to be answered. It's hard to find useful references for this kind of thing on the internet, but the following might be of interest:
http://universitywriting.shu.ac.uk/punct/advice/d_exclam.htm
http://www.writers.com/tips_punctuation.html
http://www.whitesmoke.com/punctuation-question-mark.html
The last one gives the best explanation of when you would want to consider punctuation other than a question mark. In any case, it's generally considered perfectly acceptable to do so.
You misread my statement. I never claimed a belief in god, and in fact have none. I assume no such thing, nor do I need to in order to argue that science and logic do not preclude the possibility of a god, so long as that possibility is approached from a rational standpoint. A traditional Abrahamic God (or so-called "Intelligent Designer"), however, is no such thing.
When will you learn that a rhetorical question can end with something other than a question mark!
The nature of the universe, as we currently understand it, naturally leads to the question of origins. That is to say more specifically, time seems to have had an origin at some distinct point in the past. Beyond that, however, it's all speculation. Perhaps it all came from something of similar enough character to indeed beg the question, where did that come from. Perhaps it came from nothing at all (although that's an idea you'd have to spend some time unpacking to make any sense of). Perhaps it came from something of a character such that questions of origin no longer sensibly apply.
But that's all totally beside the point. The question here is where did this world (I avoid the use of "universe" because it has troublesome implications) come from. Maybe it sprung into being ex nihilo. Maybe it was the result of some unimaginable higher level of unthinking natural process. Maybe it was the will of a creator. The problem with "turtles all the way down" is that criticism applies to any explanation other than ex nihilo spontaneous creation (which is its own can of worms). All we know right now is that, by all appearances, it did seemingly spring into being at a distinct point in the distant past, and are left pondering the question of how.
And I don't know why you said "your god." I'm fairly sure I never claimed to believe in any such thing.
I will say this though: I believe you are restricting the set of things to which you are allowing the property of "real" much more than science will allow for. It seems that you are claim that science as a whole is both ultimately complete and consistent. It is a very involved argument, but I submit in brief that this is contrary to Godel's incompleteness theorem, which I likewise submit can be applied to science as a whole. Science strives for consistency and in doing so abandons all hope for ultimate completeness. The detail of this argument, and exactly how it applies to theories of religion and the supernatural, is really FAR beyond the scope of what can be accomplished in a
Religion and science certainly are reconcilable, because their problem domains, you might say, are orthogonal when properly addressed. It's only when one encroaches onto the other's territory, so to speak, that they become otherwise. This, I think, really gets to the heart of the problem and, I'll agree with you, what I dislike about Dawkins.
You seem to be defining religion rather narrowly from the traditional Abrahamic mindset, and from that mindset religion often does conflict with science. Take a religion from the opposite end of the spectrum though, for example, Taoism. Taoism has much more in common with what you have called "Spiritualism" (a bad word to use considering that has distinct unscientific connotations; to be truthful it is not clear, from an academic standpoint, what the intended referent of "Spiritualism" is as you have used it). Keep in mind, of course, that Taoism is very much considered a religion, but it is also very much simply a celebration of mystery.
Now, I'll make one point about a very scientific concern where religion has weight and is not necessarily "at odds" with science--cosmology. To put it somewhat crudely, religion is as good an explanation as anything regarding the ultimate origin of existence. In fact, it is much stronger than many so-called "scientific" explanations (e.g. many-worlds theories which seek to account for the origin of existence, but ultimately only expand the problem domain by failing to deal with "ultimate existence" per se and simply considering a panoply of independent manifestations--begging the question as it were). To be simple, when one asks the question, "Where does it all, ultimately, come from?" or likewise "Why is there something rather than nothing?" there is nothing wrong or unscientific about saying "God," although you might hope for a fuller and more considered accounting of this answer. This is because the question itself, arguably, is outside the realm of science (a claim for which the argument is an entirely separate line of thought that I could expand on if you wish).
The problem you and Dawkins have is when religion attempts to dictate facts about the mundane world. How did such and such arise? What is the nature of this process over here? How does this object behave? These questions are fundamentally the domain of science--as are all questions regarding the operation of the universe. As such, these are the places where religion goes astray and becomes incompatible with science when it tries to assert its weight. It is important to note, however, that religion need not address these questions, and in fact many do not.
I'm brought back to the thought with which I opened this post: religion and science deal with fundamentally different problem domains. There are questions with which, given the very definition of science, science can not deal (think Godel's first incompleteness theorem as a logical illustration of how this can be the case). Likewise, there are questions with which faith has no business dealing.
Disclaimer: I am not religions, though I consider myself something of a student of these matters who enjoys some small smattering academic background in such studies. You might call me agnostic, although I don't know whether that's entirely accurate either.
When I have had the opportunity to watch him talk or debate, I have not noticed the careful qualification of his statements that you refer to. I think sometimes this is a result of him debating somebody who is such an extremist that he perhaps takes for granted that we will assume his statements are only intended for that particular sort, but he has always come across (to me at least) as painting religion in overly broad swathes.
To be honest, and this is entirely subjective on my part, I have always found him to come across as excessively arrogant in his own intelligence, which regardless of its truth comes across as distasteful. He's one of those people with whom I may agree on some fundamental levels, but have always found his combative methods excessive. I honestly think he makes more enemies for the cause of rational thought than he does friends.
I guess what he really seems to want--and again I should qualify that this is how it seems to me--is to demonstrate that science and religion are irreconcilable, which is simply untrue. Perhaps this is not the fact of the matter, and perhaps he is perfectly accepting of rational theology, but that is the impression I have gotten having seen him speaking and debating a few times without having extensively researched his position.
Science isn't really what the issue here is; religious dogma and zealotry is. Sadly, experience tells us the only way these people will ever even grudgingly accept the fault of their convictions is under the overwhelming weight of history.
That aside, what we need to be fighting is not the public misperceptions regarding science, but rather the startling tendency towards dogmatic adherence to religious creed in this country. No matter how brilliantly, concisely, clearly, and interestingly you present the scientific facts, they will hold no sway over one who is utterly and dogmatically committed to a diametrically contrary belief.
In short, what we need to be teaching is not science, but its underpinnings--rational thought and analysis. Until people learn to willingly employ those there truly is no hope.
Nonsense, Dawkins is exceedingly smart. What he doesn't have is extensive training in the philosophy of religion, which causes him to make statements that sometimes woefully misrepresent the religious perspective. What Dawkins is, however, is an evolutionary biologist, so you can somewhat understand his ardor in fighting against anti-evolutionary religious zealotry.
I think you perhaps have in mind a different historical figure.
I don't think we really need a legal precedent to deal with the corporate world in this way. We've already got a functional precedent, which is: violate the GPL--get forced to settle for an undisclosed (large) sum of money. That's what the business world cares about, and that probably means more than any legal ruling ever would when it comes down to it.
So, this Larrabee, will it be another example of integrated graphics that "supports" all the standards while being too slow to be useful in any practical situation, even basic desktop acceleration (Composite / Aero)? If so, I've gotta wonder why they even bother rather than saving some cash and just making a solid 2D accelerator that would be for all intents and purposes functionally identical.
Just don't get caught at it if you don't particularly enjoy prison.
Even WIKIPEDIA could have saved you from looking a fool: Look more for further evidence if you want. The only "rest of the world" that "felt we had it coming" were people who were already our enemies. Gee big surprise there, eh? Sure, the US has been something of a global troublemaker for a while now, but it's either ignorant or disingenuous to assert that the entire rest of the world thought we got what we deserved that day. Or do you just have that short a memory? Sorry pal, we had the world's sympathy, and we took a big shit on it.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "wrapper" in this context. To use aspell, all an application needs to do is link to libaspell.so, which provides spell checking services and already is the one common wrapper that every application calls. Beyond that, I guess you could automatically spell check common GTK widgets (check out the gtk-spell package for that), but any custom built text interfaces will have to have some kind of custom wrapper around whatever library they use anyway.
Why would it need to when there are perfectly good, widely used, third party spell checkers available (aspell)? Tell me, exactly, what the point would be in integrating it with a desktop environment, where this functionality is clearly not specific to that environment (many console programs use spell checking as well), other than to bloat that environment.
Despite complaints otherwise, these answers were not entirely content free. Clearly, in many cases they were worked over EXTENSIVELY by PR people to remove any information of a sensitive nature; both politically sensitive, as well militarily. While I certainly think they have no business censoring information because of political sensitivity (an act that works against the very foundations of a democratic society, so I find it rather offensive), that's not to say that NOTHING came though.
Some things I think I came away with:
- Overall, he seems willing to pursue candidates who might otherwise have not been "military material."
- They seem to be setting up a framework of SOME sort under which multiple intelligence agencies are able to cooperate effectively. According to my understanding, this is a drastic departure from the current state of affairs.
- They WILL be dealing with domestic targets, if only in cooperation with other domestic law enforcement bodies. This was the impression I got from their answers, but it might be reading too far into it (though I doubt it).
- Assuming the former is true, they are going to try to do an end run around domestic and civilian cyber law. The sense I got from the evasiveness (reading into what he avoided answering), was that they have no intention of abiding by the same laws that civilians and domestic law enforcement are forced to obey. My guess is it's going to be more of the same, "this is national security, those laws don't apply to us," bullshit we've been seeing for the last 8 years out of the painfully fascist leanings of the current powers that be.
While I often read too much into what isn't said, the real impression I'm getting is that they're going to try to parlay the military nature of this new cyber command into an excuse to avoid obeying the current legal restrictions faced by domestic agencies. If you thought this whole fiasco with AT&T was bad, just wait until the military gets their fingers in the cookie jar. (BEWARE the goddamn military-industrial complex. I may sound paranoid, but that's the greatest danger out there to our freedom.)
"Dollar-votes" doesn't really make sense in the context of a paid-for and a free alternative. On those grounds Linux loses by default. To put it another way, even had they started with Linux and never used Windows, it still wouldn't have gotten a "dollar-vote." Or another way, had Linux cost money then both platforms would have gotten the "dollar vote." What really matters here is market share, and on that front, Linux is what won in the end.
Maybe this is just me, but I'm pretty sure that deliberately halting development on your product is one of the best ways to sabotage its compatibility with future developments in the field. For people who aren't interested in splitting hairs, a choice to halt development is for all intents and purposes a CHOICE to avoid compatibility.
You claim that they "delivered" on a call for improved standards support, but if the page linked in this article is to be believed, that simply isn't the case. Judging by the abysmal score linked in the summary, MS has done very little to improve overall standards compatibility. My guess, although somewhat naive from being based only on these numbers, is that all they did was fix the special cases that would allow them to pass Acid2, the fact of which is revealed by Acid3.