I'm presuming that your analogy defines one or the other form of execution as "more humane", and thus preferred if one had to choose a form of execution. I'm also presuming that (mirroring the current political scenario) it's not clear which form of execution will have a higher percentage, but it is clear that they will both have a higher percentage than escape.
Where your analogy fails is that our election system is not decided on probability; that 5% chance, when compared to the 50%, is semantically identical to a 0% chance of escape. If your say in the matter has a maximum effectiveness of 0.0000004%, then you're better off voting for your preferred method of execution because that's the undecided distinction.
I'm not defending this action, but it is a failing of our voting scheme rather than of the people who "game" it by voting for the lesser of two evils. If you really want social change, you need to be pushing for realistic voting reform (read: a voting system that avoids gaming, yet is simple enough to explain to the dumbest of the dumb... sorry, Condorcet Method defenders).
Again, I don't think they should be excluded. But the Consitution does not establish the terms of a presidential or vice presidential debate, so it has nothing to do with that issue.
Now, while I agree that third parties should not be excluded from major debates, I wholeheartedly believe that it is hypocrisy to engage in civil disobedience while running for the government office responsible for executing the laws of this nation.
Republican (Neo)
Takes out a loan by selling sand to the people on the shore, then buys a line and throws it to the man.
Not quite right... remember the tax breaks? It's more like: Republican (Neo)
Takes out a loan by selling sand to the people on the shore, then buys a line and throws it to some people in a nearby yacht, under the assumption that the rope will get to the drowning man by natural market forces.
When will advertisers get the message. If people block pop-up windows, they do so for a reason - they are not interested in you're stupid special offers. They should spare themselves the bandwidth and everyone else the annoyance.
Or, since bandwidth costs are one of the reasons for showing ads in the first place, they could spare the bandwidth altogether by not showing you the article you want, either.
You are not somehow entitled to the content of sites. If they want to advertise something on their pages, or if they need to in order to support themselves, then that is their prerogative and they can take any (legal) steps they want to make sure people see them. If you don't like it, no one's holding a gun to your head to visit Salon.com. Go read another site... or better yet, make your own and offer it to millions of people while paying the costs out of your pocket.
I don't like ads any more than the next guy, but making it so that they can't be presented will only mean that the sites we know and love will have severe financial difficulties.
Come up with a better solution (a micropayments system that actually works on a large scale, for example), and I'm all ears.
This has to be a giant step forward in bringing optical disk capacities closer to being in line with current capacities of hard disks.
Furthermore, this may just be the media necessary to actually record the new streaming formats...
Problem is, you could have made this statement about any of the optical disc formats. Yes, Blue Ray will be able to hold as much as a lot of hard drives right now. But how long before we start seeing the need for yet more space?
It sure wasn't long for DVDs, which actually kinda ticks me off. I know I have only my own naivete to blame, but I was actually convinced that the improvement from VHS to DVD was great enough that it would last us for quite a while, and now I have a ginormous collection of DVDs that will rapidly seem obsolete compared to the new HD movie releases.
Sony made the Betamax...tapes weren't long enough to record baseball games on TV, though... so they lost to the VHS standard made by an upstart company. (This by way of the informative airline video I had on my last trip to Japan.)
...which, ironically, was played from a laserdisc.
The people with these sites are playing hardball. Google wants them on their side, though, because they often display Google text ads.
Ah, but there's the trick... manipulating pagerank precludes these sites from having to buy text ads. By fixing the pagerank algorithms, Google would more than likely increase the text ad purchases by these sites.
The key to remember here is that Google text ads are only as valuable as Google's popularity. Google's popularity is only as valuable as its ability to fulfill it's primary purpose: returning relevant web pages to a search string.
If Google does an elaborate dance to avoid offending its text ad clients, and consequently loses its searcher base, then the text ad clients are going to disappear anyway.
Howsabout, nothing is pure evil... every human action is a function of multiple motivations, some of which are well-intentioned and some of which are ill-intentioned.
You managed to score some good moderation for what is essentially a pedantic argument; despite the wording, I highly doubt the original poster literally believed pagerank services to be the absolute worst human creation, and you impressed no one (except, apparently, a few moderators) with your ability to say "oh, yeah? well I can think of much worse things!"
Especially since you conveniently ignore the fact that human history has seen worse things than 9/11, which (by your logic) would inherently negate your own claim that 9/11 was "pure evil".
Thanks for the response. Your cause might not be as controversial as that of a NAMBLA, but it's still an unnecessary risk for very little gain. Jury or no, whoever the deciding party of the case is liable to take a claim of "my controversial group used Winny to great effect without breaking any laws" as "Winny helps people encourage illegal activities", even if that's not your actual use of it.
The only thing he would gain is the ability to say that Winny has legal uses... which he can say anyway, without implying any sort of connection with any controversial viewpoints.
Relax, buddy. I wasn't making an argument about this guy's particular plight. Instead, I was noting that the guns=filesharing metaphor is not as simple as some would have it be. The underlying concepts are different, and must be treated differently from a legal perspective. That's all.
The choice to share copyrighted materials is yours
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Freenet distribute encrypted shared files across multiple computers so that they're protected from the removal of one node of the network?
I don't know anything about the inner workings of winny, but if it's at all similar (and if I remembered that correctly) then you are actually subject to someone else's choice to share copyrighted materials, as an accessory.
That doesn't inherently make it morally right or wrong, but it's an important distinction from guns... other gun owners aren't doing anything to help your gun shoot a person.
I am actually currently trying to get ahold of his attorney (more specifically, I'm trying to figure out who is attorney is) because I want to stand in court and testify for him. I am a member of a group that has ideas that are contrary to current laws.
No offense, but if I were his lawyer I would be very hesitant to allow someone to testify who is essentially a complete stranger with a controversial streak.
I'll take your word for it that your group doesn't break any laws. But if you're a spokesman for NAMBLA or something, I still wouldn't want my client getting associated (in the eyes of the judge/jury) with your political movement; it's likely to do more harm than good.
Why 4^4 rather than 3^4? It turns out that 3^n for any n>2 has an easy strategy that allows the first player to always win. Proving that is left as an exercise for the reader.
What, was there not enough room to put it in the margin?
Does the ACLU defend the right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater? I honestly don't know, but I expect not, which would be in keeping with the "reasonable interpretation" of the constitution that they apply to the second amendment.
If you have information about that, I'd be interested in hearing it.
But what about the "more eyes on the code" approach? I mean, even if only a tiny fraction of people care enough to delve into the inner workings, you would at least have more people trying to use the main program in different ways, and you'd find security holes and bugs more easily.
How would you define a 1.0 release? How can we?
1.0 is "the earliest release of the program that is stable enough, and featured enough, for general usage." Gaim hit that a while ago, but didn't label it so.
If you're not going to use that definition, which is essentially the standard one, then why have less-than-one version numbers at all? Why don't you label every build Gaim 04262004150548 (or whatever)? Less-than-one only serves to give people the impression that you're not ready for them to use Gaim yet, which isn't really true (I hope).
I'd say a lot of the 3D data out there doesn't (and won't) have an original "3D matrix" of points/colors at all, since it was created by a modeller of some sort rather than based on real-world information.
Thus, what I was referring to was a way to lose some of the bajillion triangle/texture definitions of a scene in a way that is practically indistinguishable from the original. Theoretically, you could reduce a high-resolution (many triangles) sphere far off in the distance into a simpler object (fewer triangles), but you'd have to [A.] know that it was originally a sphere (so you could know how to reduce the triangle mesh), and [B.] have a fixed reference point such to say that it's far off in the distance. If the viewable point in the final program is nonstatic, then you'll need all that lost information after all.
But that's the kind of "lossy" compression I was describing.
The lossiness of MP3 and JPEG was only relevant because it allowed the actual files to become small enough to transmit over slow connections and fit on small hard drives. Additionally, while they may be lossy, the "lost" information goes completely unnoticed by the end-user, 99.99% of the time. If they come up with a convenient way of storing 3D information that is "lossy" but doesn't lose anything that will be missed, then more power to them.
Additionally, the demand for small files, and therefore for MP3 and JPEG, draws on preexisting "content" sets that are enormous; all the audio data ever recorded (including in analog media), and all the static, 2D visual data ever recorded (including photos, texts, drawings, etc). By comparison, there are currently relatively few recordings of true 3D data; and the present uses of that recorded data are so specialized that a general file format would probably be insufficient anyway.
So the day that Wal-mart starts selling digital cameras that laser-scan the whole room and render a complete 3D model, and the day they start selling holographic projectors for those 3D models, at prices that are reasonable for personal use, then there will be a market for a generic 3D file format.
Apache seems to have done all right, so has Linux. Samba's fairly well known among the people who would care about its existence at all.
Additionally, Lindows/Lindos/Winux/etc is focusing on marketing. They almost certainly realized when they created the name, or have figured out since, that they would be pissing off Microsoft with it. As a result, they've had several reasonably high-profile lawsuits that have given them more publicity than they could have ever bought. There's no such thing as bad publicity, as the saying goes.
As for Gimp and PostgreSQL and all the other poorly named open source programs, just keep in mind that they're usually started as small, pet projects by a few people. They're not as thoroughly planned as the average big-corporate product.
People don't trust statistics because statistics are so often intentionally or unintentionally misleading.
The plural of "anecdote" may be "data" to too many people, but that's only because the plural of "lie" is "margin of error" within too many scientific circles.
It's great, I don't even have to destabilize my game with Alt+tab, I just hit the button on my monitor that switches between composite video and DVI. Ain't technology grand?
Slashdot Mirror
Where your analogy fails is that our election system is not decided on probability; that 5% chance, when compared to the 50%, is semantically identical to a 0% chance of escape. If your say in the matter has a maximum effectiveness of 0.0000004%, then you're better off voting for your preferred method of execution because that's the undecided distinction.
I'm not defending this action, but it is a failing of our voting scheme rather than of the people who "game" it by voting for the lesser of two evils. If you really want social change, you need to be pushing for realistic voting reform (read: a voting system that avoids gaming, yet is simple enough to explain to the dumbest of the dumb... sorry, Condorcet Method defenders).
Hence my problem with it by someone who wants to be the chief executor of the law.
Again, I don't think they should be excluded. But the Consitution does not establish the terms of a presidential or vice presidential debate, so it has nothing to do with that issue.
Now, while I agree that third parties should not be excluded from major debates, I wholeheartedly believe that it is hypocrisy to engage in civil disobedience while running for the government office responsible for executing the laws of this nation.
Republican (Neo)
Takes out a loan by selling sand to the people on the shore, then buys a line and throws it to some people in a nearby yacht, under the assumption that the rope will get to the drowning man by natural market forces.
Or, since bandwidth costs are one of the reasons for showing ads in the first place, they could spare the bandwidth altogether by not showing you the article you want, either.
You are not somehow entitled to the content of sites. If they want to advertise something on their pages, or if they need to in order to support themselves, then that is their prerogative and they can take any (legal) steps they want to make sure people see them. If you don't like it, no one's holding a gun to your head to visit Salon.com. Go read another site... or better yet, make your own and offer it to millions of people while paying the costs out of your pocket.
I don't like ads any more than the next guy, but making it so that they can't be presented will only mean that the sites we know and love will have severe financial difficulties.
Come up with a better solution (a micropayments system that actually works on a large scale, for example), and I'm all ears.
Problem is, you could have made this statement about any of the optical disc formats. Yes, Blue Ray will be able to hold as much as a lot of hard drives right now. But how long before we start seeing the need for yet more space?
It sure wasn't long for DVDs, which actually kinda ticks me off. I know I have only my own naivete to blame, but I was actually convinced that the improvement from VHS to DVD was great enough that it would last us for quite a while, and now I have a ginormous collection of DVDs that will rapidly seem obsolete compared to the new HD movie releases.
Grumble grumble.
HOO-HAH-HAH! Jay, this is Al HOO-HAH-HAH Pacino. I can't stop saying "HOO-HAH-HAH"! Go see my new movie, Finding Nemo Part HOO-HAH-HAH!
The key to remember here is that Google text ads are only as valuable as Google's popularity. Google's popularity is only as valuable as its ability to fulfill it's primary purpose: returning relevant web pages to a search string.
If Google does an elaborate dance to avoid offending its text ad clients, and consequently loses its searcher base, then the text ad clients are going to disappear anyway.
Howsabout, nothing is pure evil... every human action is a function of multiple motivations, some of which are well-intentioned and some of which are ill-intentioned.
You managed to score some good moderation for what is essentially a pedantic argument; despite the wording, I highly doubt the original poster literally believed pagerank services to be the absolute worst human creation, and you impressed no one (except, apparently, a few moderators) with your ability to say "oh, yeah? well I can think of much worse things!"
Especially since you conveniently ignore the fact that human history has seen worse things than 9/11, which (by your logic) would inherently negate your own claim that 9/11 was "pure evil".
You're new here, aren't you?
The only thing he would gain is the ability to say that Winny has legal uses... which he can say anyway, without implying any sort of connection with any controversial viewpoints.
Relax, buddy. I wasn't making an argument about this guy's particular plight. Instead, I was noting that the guns=filesharing metaphor is not as simple as some would have it be. The underlying concepts are different, and must be treated differently from a legal perspective. That's all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Freenet distribute encrypted shared files across multiple computers so that they're protected from the removal of one node of the network?
I don't know anything about the inner workings of winny, but if it's at all similar (and if I remembered that correctly) then you are actually subject to someone else's choice to share copyrighted materials, as an accessory.
That doesn't inherently make it morally right or wrong, but it's an important distinction from guns... other gun owners aren't doing anything to help your gun shoot a person.
No offense, but if I were his lawyer I would be very hesitant to allow someone to testify who is essentially a complete stranger with a controversial streak.
I'll take your word for it that your group doesn't break any laws. But if you're a spokesman for NAMBLA or something, I still wouldn't want my client getting associated (in the eyes of the judge/jury) with your political movement; it's likely to do more harm than good.
Umm, yeah... because that worked so well with the metric system.
What, was there not enough room to put it in the margin?
Does the ACLU defend the right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater? I honestly don't know, but I expect not, which would be in keeping with the "reasonable interpretation" of the constitution that they apply to the second amendment.
If you have information about that, I'd be interested in hearing it.
1.0 is "the earliest release of the program that is stable enough, and featured enough, for general usage." Gaim hit that a while ago, but didn't label it so.
If you're not going to use that definition, which is essentially the standard one, then why have less-than-one version numbers at all? Why don't you label every build Gaim 04262004150548 (or whatever)? Less-than-one only serves to give people the impression that you're not ready for them to use Gaim yet, which isn't really true (I hope).
I'd say a lot of the 3D data out there doesn't (and won't) have an original "3D matrix" of points/colors at all, since it was created by a modeller of some sort rather than based on real-world information.
Thus, what I was referring to was a way to lose some of the bajillion triangle/texture definitions of a scene in a way that is practically indistinguishable from the original. Theoretically, you could reduce a high-resolution (many triangles) sphere far off in the distance into a simpler object (fewer triangles), but you'd have to [A.] know that it was originally a sphere (so you could know how to reduce the triangle mesh), and [B.] have a fixed reference point such to say that it's far off in the distance. If the viewable point in the final program is nonstatic, then you'll need all that lost information after all.
But that's the kind of "lossy" compression I was describing.
The lossiness of MP3 and JPEG was only relevant because it allowed the actual files to become small enough to transmit over slow connections and fit on small hard drives. Additionally, while they may be lossy, the "lost" information goes completely unnoticed by the end-user, 99.99% of the time. If they come up with a convenient way of storing 3D information that is "lossy" but doesn't lose anything that will be missed, then more power to them.
Additionally, the demand for small files, and therefore for MP3 and JPEG, draws on preexisting "content" sets that are enormous; all the audio data ever recorded (including in analog media), and all the static, 2D visual data ever recorded (including photos, texts, drawings, etc). By comparison, there are currently relatively few recordings of true 3D data; and the present uses of that recorded data are so specialized that a general file format would probably be insufficient anyway.
So the day that Wal-mart starts selling digital cameras that laser-scan the whole room and render a complete 3D model, and the day they start selling holographic projectors for those 3D models, at prices that are reasonable for personal use, then there will be a market for a generic 3D file format.
Additionally, Lindows/Lindos/Winux/etc is focusing on marketing. They almost certainly realized when they created the name, or have figured out since, that they would be pissing off Microsoft with it. As a result, they've had several reasonably high-profile lawsuits that have given them more publicity than they could have ever bought. There's no such thing as bad publicity, as the saying goes.
As for Gimp and PostgreSQL and all the other poorly named open source programs, just keep in mind that they're usually started as small, pet projects by a few people. They're not as thoroughly planned as the average big-corporate product.
The plural of "anecdote" may be "data" to too many people, but that's only because the plural of "lie" is "margin of error" within too many scientific circles.
It's great, I don't even have to destabilize my game with Alt+tab, I just hit the button on my monitor that switches between composite video and DVI. Ain't technology grand?