If they mess this up there will be many people who will want to roll through the gates of hell carrying the developers heads on a spike... While they use their arm to pat kittens of course.
That's interesting. I've lately been seeing more and more evidence that liberals are really just moderates. They seem to be more and more for just maintaining the status quo.
I used to consider myself as in the liberal camp but now find myself much further to the left. I value education, science, freedom, free speech and heavily criticize religion and would like to see it disappear, such values used to be very common with the left.
What seems to me to have happened now though is traditional leftist values have been weakened by the trend towards liberalism, we often find liberal people saying rubbish like science is just a western form of thinking, that we shouldn't criticize cultures and religions that result in the torture and muder of homosexuals or the subjugation of women and children, and then a whole lot of 'anti-western' thinking untempered any form of rationality.
With regards to the article though, I agree with everyone saying this is just stupid, it has the very real potential to hinder progress in less democratic countries, and I can't see what possible good it could achieve.
On the Cuban trade embargo, I also not being from America, see the trade embargo against Cuba as very strange. Though I thought that the reason it still existed was more to keep Cubans living in America happy because they didn't want America dealing with Fidel? I was actually speaking to a guy from Cuba a couple of days ago via Jabber, he said that he fixes computers there. He said that a computer in Cuba costs about 25,000 Cuban Pesos, and he makes only 600 Cuban Pesos a month... I would really like see that trade emargo disappear so that the Cuban people could start trading more easily and get more money.
I'd be happily surprised if a National government was the one to embrace Free software and start the process of eventually seeing it used in schools, which then flows to the work place and homes... But we'll see... I would be very surprised if the government picked open source.
Reminds me of the scene in the new Star Trek movie with all the people escaping from the Enterprise, and you see the scene with a massive star behind them, and they look like tiny specks against it.
Isn't this slashdot article enough to cause problems for you? If corrupt police suspect you have information that could harm them, then what is to stop them from causing problems for you? They're already corrupt aren't they?
I would say put it on wikileaks as fast as you can.
I'm not a lawyer though, so perhaps there are reasons to not do this? Perhaps contact a lawyer first. Give them a copy of the documents.
What they really were is hard to tell. As any powerful leader has known for hundreds of years, you have to appear religious. That is slowly changing now though... But many things that the founding fathers of America said seem to indicate that they did not really believe in a god.
Anyway, keeping religion and state separate is a very good idea and one that should be maintained.
We're geeks... So the reason is "because we can".
It provides a system where we don't have another blackbox. We can actually understand down to the lowest level how things are working. This is great for people who desire to understand how things work, and also people that hope for a future of machines and hardware that are under the control of the owners.
Sorry to get a bit crazy here, but imagine a world with technology like that in Ghost in the Shell. I would not go getting such implants and additions if I did not and could not have complete control and understanding over the stuff. This type of project is a small step in maintaining individual control.
"It's fitting, in this 400th anniversary of the astronomical telescope, that the Telescopio Nationale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands would be used to uncover the most distant object ever seen by mankind.
It's fitting in a numerological sort of way... I'm sure that any day you'd care to pick out in the year could be linked to some date in the past that is also connected with some event in the field of astronomy, whether it be the birthday of a famous astronomer, the discovery of a moon, an extra-solar planet, the day Voyager started photographing or stopped photographing a planet...
Sorry to be an old grump.... Perhaps it's simply because I found out a very cute girl I know thinks numerology is anything more than utter nonsense and I want better genes for my children...
No, I mean the community as a whole, which while it may consist mostly of moderate people, forms a powerbase and fertile field for the growth of a small amount of extremists.
And I would say the same about a Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Scientologist or any other religious community. That it provides a safe environment in which belief is incuabted, nutured and protected from criticism, which obviously allows even just a tiny amount of people to developed strong fundamentalist beliefs.
A rational scientific community doesn't have this danger in general because science thrives on criticism and evidence. So I think we can be quite certain that we wouldn't see someone kill another because one believes that dinosaurs were killed by a meteor collison with earth and the other believes that mammals evolved and ate the eggs.
I hope you are right about just giving them more time. But I worry that the communities they have formed in western societies will protect them from progressing out of their backwards misogynistic ways.
In the west, as you've point out, the situtation for women is now much better. I think this is in large part due to the weakening of religion in our modern lives, and so strong religious communities such as many Muslim ones, are a danger to our modern culture. It's not the people I have an issue with, but the barbaric parts of the culture that they bring with them and try to maintain.
It is still fueled by the same stupid lack of critical thinking that fuels religion. Many of the reasons that FGM has continued is due to superstitious beliefs. Things like if they don't remove the clitoris, it will grow around the girls neck and strangle her in her sleep, and other stupid things.
FGM is also carried out mostly by Muslims, and I would argue it will continue while Muslims continue to believe that women are second rate humans.
Hasn't the British government been allowing Sharia courts to operate in Britain for some time?
If they want to battle "radical" Islam then how about getting rid of the Sharia Courts? How about really clamping down on female genital mutilation happening in Britain and to British citizens?
Tweaking some search results, that's pathetic. Islam is a danger to civilized nations, so trying to weaken it is fine, but this pathetic, it will do next to nothing.
Yes actually, I consider naive libertarians and anarcho-capitalists and others that naively believe in the invisible hand of the market as religious. That is not to say that I don't agree with some of what they say, but the naive ones take it too far.
Democracy I'm in full favour of. But I have no problem with it being questioned/critiqued.
It seems to me that you have more of an axe to grind if you're trying to say that Stalin, Mao or others are somehow reflective of what the vast majority of non-religious leaders are like. Where as I am very likely to find worrying problems with any openly religious politician picked at random.
Yes they are some how better.
Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il... They were very religious. Bertrand Russell had a lot of criticism for the religion of communism.
Part of the step towards questioning the state has to be raising the conciousness and level of intelligence of the general populace. Part of that is getting them to part with childish fantasy.
I would say that the politicians that advertise their religiousity are the dodgy ones. They're basically taking the advice of Machiavelli which I'll quote for you here... "A prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality." For prince, simply substitute poticians.
Now with regards to the truely religious politicians who aren't cynically using it as a tool for votes, I would say they're simply not smart enough or critical enough to be put into a position of power.
How long is it going to take people to learn. Blair, Bush, Rudd and Conroy... Four politicians I can name in recent times who advertise their religiousity, four politicians who have backed terrible plans and ignored criticism.
When will people learn to vote for the less religious politicians, or even the agnostic/atheist politicians?
That looks awesome. But without having a well defined license this program won't be able to be included in the repositories of many distros. That's really sad.:-\
I hope that she'll reconsider for utilitarian reasons at least.
Having also spent some time in China I completely agree with you.
From what I've seen coming out from the central government they are really trying to improve things, but the local government branches are very corrupt.
My favourite examples are the illegal brothels that just pay off police and others. You can often seen a police office situated right next to a brothel in some areas.
Now this doesn't mean that I'm against prostition, I just think it's a simple example of the corruption there.
Slashdot Mirror
If they mess this up there will be many people who will want to roll through the gates of hell carrying the developers heads on a spike... While they use their arm to pat kittens of course.
That's interesting. I've lately been seeing more and more evidence that liberals are really just moderates. They seem to be more and more for just maintaining the status quo.
I used to consider myself as in the liberal camp but now find myself much further to the left. I value education, science, freedom, free speech and heavily criticize religion and would like to see it disappear, such values used to be very common with the left.
What seems to me to have happened now though is traditional leftist values have been weakened by the trend towards liberalism, we often find liberal people saying rubbish like science is just a western form of thinking, that we shouldn't criticize cultures and religions that result in the torture and muder of homosexuals or the subjugation of women and children, and then a whole lot of 'anti-western' thinking untempered any form of rationality.
With regards to the article though, I agree with everyone saying this is just stupid, it has the very real potential to hinder progress in less democratic countries, and I can't see what possible good it could achieve.
On the Cuban trade embargo, I also not being from America, see the trade embargo against Cuba as very strange. Though I thought that the reason it still existed was more to keep Cubans living in America happy because they didn't want America dealing with Fidel? I was actually speaking to a guy from Cuba a couple of days ago via Jabber, he said that he fixes computers there. He said that a computer in Cuba costs about 25,000 Cuban Pesos, and he makes only 600 Cuban Pesos a month... I would really like see that trade emargo disappear so that the Cuban people could start trading more easily and get more money.
I'd be happily surprised if a National government was the one to embrace Free software and start the process of eventually seeing it used in schools, which then flows to the work place and homes... But we'll see... I would be very surprised if the government picked open source.
Reminds me of the scene in the new Star Trek movie with all the people escaping from the Enterprise, and you see the scene with a massive star behind them, and they look like tiny specks against it.
Isn't this slashdot article enough to cause problems for you? If corrupt police suspect you have information that could harm them, then what is to stop them from causing problems for you? They're already corrupt aren't they?
I would say put it on wikileaks as fast as you can.
I'm not a lawyer though, so perhaps there are reasons to not do this? Perhaps contact a lawyer first. Give them a copy of the documents.
What they really were is hard to tell. As any powerful leader has known for hundreds of years, you have to appear religious. That is slowly changing now though... But many things that the founding fathers of America said seem to indicate that they did not really believe in a god. Anyway, keeping religion and state separate is a very good idea and one that should be maintained.
We can prove that certain things aren't possible. Alan Turing did exactly this in his famous paper.
We're geeks... So the reason is "because we can". It provides a system where we don't have another blackbox. We can actually understand down to the lowest level how things are working. This is great for people who desire to understand how things work, and also people that hope for a future of machines and hardware that are under the control of the owners.
Sorry to get a bit crazy here, but imagine a world with technology like that in Ghost in the Shell. I would not go getting such implants and additions if I did not and could not have complete control and understanding over the stuff. This type of project is a small step in maintaining individual control.
He already uses a Lemote Yeeloong laptop which has a Free BIOS and doesn't require non-free firmware.
Our oversized ape brains allow us to take control of our evolution to some extent. It's kind of another watershed moment in our evolution I think. There is an awesome TED talk about this, here you go. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html
I take Ritalin by prescription and have no problems retaining the knowledge I take in while the Ritalin in still helping me.
"It's fitting, in this 400th anniversary of the astronomical telescope, that the Telescopio Nationale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands would be used to uncover the most distant object ever seen by mankind.
It's fitting in a numerological sort of way... I'm sure that any day you'd care to pick out in the year could be linked to some date in the past that is also connected with some event in the field of astronomy, whether it be the birthday of a famous astronomer, the discovery of a moon, an extra-solar planet, the day Voyager started photographing or stopped photographing a planet...
Sorry to be an old grump.... Perhaps it's simply because I found out a very cute girl I know thinks numerology is anything more than utter nonsense and I want better genes for my children...
No, I mean the community as a whole, which while it may consist mostly of moderate people, forms a powerbase and fertile field for the growth of a small amount of extremists.
And I would say the same about a Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Scientologist or any other religious community. That it provides a safe environment in which belief is incuabted, nutured and protected from criticism, which obviously allows even just a tiny amount of people to developed strong fundamentalist beliefs.
A rational scientific community doesn't have this danger in general because science thrives on criticism and evidence. So I think we can be quite certain that we wouldn't see someone kill another because one believes that dinosaurs were killed by a meteor collison with earth and the other believes that mammals evolved and ate the eggs.
I hope you are right about just giving them more time. But I worry that the communities they have formed in western societies will protect them from progressing out of their backwards misogynistic ways.
In the west, as you've point out, the situtation for women is now much better. I think this is in large part due to the weakening of religion in our modern lives, and so strong religious communities such as many Muslim ones, are a danger to our modern culture. It's not the people I have an issue with, but the barbaric parts of the culture that they bring with them and try to maintain.
It is still fueled by the same stupid lack of critical thinking that fuels religion. Many of the reasons that FGM has continued is due to superstitious beliefs. Things like if they don't remove the clitoris, it will grow around the girls neck and strangle her in her sleep, and other stupid things. FGM is also carried out mostly by Muslims, and I would argue it will continue while Muslims continue to believe that women are second rate humans.
Hasn't the British government been allowing Sharia courts to operate in Britain for some time?
If they want to battle "radical" Islam then how about getting rid of the Sharia Courts? How about really clamping down on female genital mutilation happening in Britain and to British citizens?
Tweaking some search results, that's pathetic. Islam is a danger to civilized nations, so trying to weaken it is fine, but this pathetic, it will do next to nothing.
That's no moon! That's a werewolf power station!
There is a vegetarian girl that I'm interested in. I wonder if I'd get sex in exchange for an offering of meat?
Yes actually, I consider naive libertarians and anarcho-capitalists and others that naively believe in the invisible hand of the market as religious. That is not to say that I don't agree with some of what they say, but the naive ones take it too far.
Democracy I'm in full favour of. But I have no problem with it being questioned/critiqued.
It seems to me that you have more of an axe to grind if you're trying to say that Stalin, Mao or others are somehow reflective of what the vast majority of non-religious leaders are like. Where as I am very likely to find worrying problems with any openly religious politician picked at random.
Yes they are some how better.
Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong Il... They were very religious. Bertrand Russell had a lot of criticism for the religion of communism.
Part of the step towards questioning the state has to be raising the conciousness and level of intelligence of the general populace. Part of that is getting them to part with childish fantasy.
I would say that the politicians that advertise their religiousity are the dodgy ones. They're basically taking the advice of Machiavelli which I'll quote for you here... "A prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality." For prince, simply substitute poticians.
Now with regards to the truely religious politicians who aren't cynically using it as a tool for votes, I would say they're simply not smart enough or critical enough to be put into a position of power.
How long is it going to take people to learn. Blair, Bush, Rudd and Conroy... Four politicians I can name in recent times who advertise their religiousity, four politicians who have backed terrible plans and ignored criticism.
When will people learn to vote for the less religious politicians, or even the agnostic/atheist politicians?
That looks awesome. But without having a well defined license this program won't be able to be included in the repositories of many distros. That's really sad. :-\
I hope that she'll reconsider for utilitarian reasons at least.
Ah but about a science programme on the physics of ballet? :-)
Having also spent some time in China I completely agree with you. From what I've seen coming out from the central government they are really trying to improve things, but the local government branches are very corrupt. My favourite examples are the illegal brothels that just pay off police and others. You can often seen a police office situated right next to a brothel in some areas. Now this doesn't mean that I'm against prostition, I just think it's a simple example of the corruption there.