>That's like saying that to get a valid sample of traffic you can't measure it on one road, you have to measure it on all roads.
Which is true. Ever heard of "sample size" issues ? One road can only give you a sample of traffic on that one road. If you want a sample for a region you need to check as many roads in that region as possible. The more you include the more valid your study. If you study one road and call it a sample of the traffic in the city then you're study is useless.
I mean do you really think my quite little beach-side road where I live is a valid representative sample of the traffic in the metropolis where I live ? The people who spend 4 hours a day in traffic jams sure as fuck won't agree.
If you purchased a digital copy of diablo III (as over 2-million people did this week) - then you got it delivered over bittorrent by default (same client-update system that WoW uses).
If you purchased it on DVD (as I did) - the updates and patches still default to bittorrent. Granted you can disable the torrent support and use a direct HTTP download - but that is obviously much, much slower.
Outside of Jewelry ? Good luck with that. You do realize that actual gold coins are priced way outside the average small investor's income... for a year... right ?
Amount of Gold Bullion in the world today: Roughly a cube the size of a tennis court.
Amount of Gold Bullion for which gold certificates are in trade: about 3 such cubes.
None of your claims about gold hold true when you realize that two thirds of the people who think they own gold just have a certificate to a piece of metal that doesn't even EXIST ! More accurately, for every person who actually owns some gold, two other people have legal proof that they are the owners of that same gold.
Turns out that long after kings stopped debasing currency with gold-plated lead corruption didn't end. Corrupt bankers found ways to print gold and sell the same gold to multiple investors.
Sorry pal, but gold is no more "real" as a currency base than paper money or any other kind. Fuck logically speaking bitcoins are a truer currency than gold because at least so far nobody has found a way to fake them or give the same bitcoin to more than one recipient.
That's pretty much what SOPA, PIPA and the like were (the details differ, not the principal). And as you predict - people did argue it was unjust, and thats why SOPA didn't make it onto the statutes.
At least that suggests an upper limit to how far America's population will allow their politicians to be bought. Previously the possibility of such a limit seemed to require a solid grounding in transfinite mathematics to hypothesise.
Well I find that quite a fascinating proposal. X/0 is an unknown infinite (there is no such number as infinity though - we're about 200 years past that idea) but X/X = 1
So which of the two rules should actually apply to X=0 ?
Seems from your post that mathematicians pretty much interchangeably swap...
If MegaUpload could be shut down in the US, then so can this. Of course, that was the other side of the same battle. When the side which can afford politicians are doing it, you can bet if anybody tried to prosecute they'd get some kind of law-change to make it legal to hack civilian computer networks for the purposes of disrupting illegal file-sharing.
>BTW, what country do you live in? I can only guess, and don't have much of a clue where and what tradition you're even talking about.
I live in South Africa, our original court system was the Dutch-Roman system. Since 1994 there were some reforms in the court system, but it's essentially still a Dutch-Roman court base. What changed was that we instituted a judicar-state where the constitutional court is in fact the highest power in the land, not the executive government. This was actually an alien system to both the major parties in the original negotiations (the National Party and the African Nationalist Congress were both nationalist movements - with a strong preference for Westminster government). It got instituted as a compromise since neither party trusted the other enough to want to let a government with them in it be the highest power in the land - so they chose to make government subject to the court.
Well I wasn't really trying to debate which system is better - I think they both have pros and cons. The biggest con of our system is that judges can have too much power and abuse it. The biggest con of the jury system is that you can play on jurors emotions to get an outcome that really should never have happened (think O.J. here).
What I do like about our system now is that it empowers citizens - judgements have force of law, and judges can create and abolish what we call common law. This put at least some legislative control back in the hands of citizens. Ultimately our constitutional court can actually order parliament to make legislated laws, scrap laws not constitutional and order them to act on constitutional rights. The reason I say this empowers citizens is that anybody can bring a court case. It's much easier to do that than to try and influence politicians who are too easily bought.
When it works the court system provides our most important guardianship of civil rights. It was a court decision that forced government to legalize gay marriage and provide anti-retrovirals to rape victims for example. When it doesn't work well we get government complaining that "unelected judges should not get to tell elected officials how to govern".
That said - the civil law tradition, at least our version, still has an adversarial trial aspect. It's just that the person you're supposed to convince is a respected and educated authority on the law (again, in theory:P )
Like I said, I see pros and cons to both systems, and I'm not fully sold on either. I was just mentioning that the system I'm familiar with is different from yours so my statement may not be accurate in your country.
There's a brilliant line on this in "The science of discworld" - I won't pretend I can quote it 100% accurately off the top of my head but it goes something like this: "In the media you will often read that a certain scientist is trying to prove a theory. Maybe it's because journalists are trained in journalism and don't know how science works or maybe it's because journalists are trained in journalism and don't care how science works - but a good scientist never tries to prove her theory, a good scientist tries her best to disprove her theory before somebody else does it for her, failing to disprove it is what makes a theory trustworthy."
Talk about rewriting history... Linus did not "choose the GPL", the first versions of Linux had a completely different license more similar to the creative-commons non-commercial license than to the GPL.
Linus changed to the license after several years. Many of the contributors were unhappy and requested that the non-commercial clause be dropped, Linus then considered that the operating system that his kernel was being used with was almost entirely licensed under the GPL and decided it made sense to change it to the same license.
> but everything you credit him for was a collective effort. Can you name anywone else involved in those projects?
Then we should also not credit Torvalds for the kernel, or Gossling for Java or... oh shit EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SOFTWARE BIGGER THEN HELLO WORLD WAS WRITTEN BY MULTIPLE PEOPLE ! We credit the people who start something and lead something in the beginning for having done so. This does not detract from the people who contribute - in fact letting them contribute and ensuring their contributions will always be available to them (and others) was RMS's greatest achievement.
Stallman spoke out against the "think of the children" excuse... you shout: "Look he doesn't want to thin kof the children !"
>He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him
Aah yes, because using a technological tool to save you time and fit in with the way you like to work is the mark of a Luddite right ?
> Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.
Stallman in fact did NOT say "at all costs". I asked him, in person, once what a person should do if his job is impossible to do without proprietary software. He replied: "Get a new job", - and this is where idiots like you stopped listening, because then he laughed and said the bit you always pretend he never says: "We can't stop doing all the jobs for which free software aren't available or we'll never get anywhere. Just like I had to use a non-free unix to write the first GNU software on. But if you are in that position, and you believe in free software, then you should contribute in whatever ways you can towards assisting projects that aim to create a free software replacement for your needs." How reasonable, how pragmatic... yes Stallman is insistent, his insistence is the only reason we even HAVE free software operating systems. But he's not nearly the self-defeating dogmatic that people like you always paint him as either. It certainly isn't Stallman's position that anybody should refuse life-saving medical care if there isn't free software in use. He has campaigned to have the control software for pacemakers made free - so that patients' lives aren't at the mercy of corporations but he never said that in the meantime nobody should wear a pacemaker - which is the position you are demanding he take.
The first line is pure ad hominem - whether you like his personality, personal habits or social skills are not in fact remotely relevant to whether he is right about things.
All that aside: the man just got rushed into a hospital - for many of us who know him and share his ideals - this is a big deal, I know this will shock the hell out of you but some of us actually LIKE the guy and care about it. A personal attack on the day he got rushed to hospital is really, really poor taste. Now granted Stallman has been known for some poor taste at times as well... you even posted an example of one... but if you are going to do exactly the same thing you accuse him of -that makes you a hypocrite.
> but think about all the times they try and put someone in the cell with a person, and trying and get the person to confess to the crime that they're being held for...
You're aware that they usually put some sort of recording device in there as well, right ? I got several lawyers in my family and they are all clear hearsay is explicitly not allowed except in a few very rare circumstances. But - their knowledge is not of AMERICAN law, so there could be more exceptions there - perhaps because you have a jury system and we have a judge-only system.
We believe that 12 random people simply cannot know the law well enough to give somebody a fair trial.
The greatest medical schools in the world for example are in Switzerland. The best art schools are in France. The best drama schools are in Britain. The best engineering schools are in Germany and Japan.
Actually... while you do have some wonderful universities that have done a great deal of good work, I struggle to think of a single field where yours are generally accepted as "the best in the world". Well... unless you count the McDonalds trainee program, when it comes to dehumanizing people, destroying their self-worth and teaching them to make really horrible hamburgers - America is definitely the best in the world.
>And oftentimes your friend can be subpoenaed as to the contents of that communication.
To what end ? That's hearsay evidence and wouldn't be admissible anyway. Let's try to stretch the analogy to where it at least makes sense. Your friend is death, you don't know sign language, so while she was there you communicated by writing to her on little sticky notes. Now in theory she could be subpoenaed to hand those sticky notes over - at least that's a real written record, so not hearsay anymore and thus proper evidence. The thing is however, that they are in your, or her, house - where they cannot be simply ceased. A subpeona isn't enough - you need a warrant to obtain documents that are located in a private home.
A twitter stream marked private, and those messages sent using the private-message mechanism should be treated no differently. They are not public information, they are private documents held on private property and should require a warrant from a judge to be handed over, not just a subpoena from a lawyer.
Did you miss the location ? It was NOT slow if you were in South Africa. At that stage it still tended to take a while for US technology to reach the bottom of Africa. Hell, in some cases, it still does.
Hell most corporates here were still running on 10Mbps ethernet at the time.
Actually that's not the most dangerous scenario. The most dangerous electrical shocks are straight through the blood-stream - blood has a much lower resistance than skin - and goes straight over the heart. My father is an electrical engineer - his final thesis included a proof that just 1v straight to the blood is deadly.
Here's what really happens in most electrical shock deaths: the current causes a muscle spasm preventing you from letting go. Now you have voltage over high resistance - so the current isn't fatal. However - voltage against high resistance is known to produce large amounts of heat (that's how stove plates work). The heat starts to burn you, eventually it burns through the skin - and when that happens the voltage goes straight through the bloodstream - which is an excellent conductor - bang, you're dead.
This is why we teach people that if somebody is experiencing electrical shock you should use a non-conductive object (such as a wooden broom) to push him away rather than try to do so with your hands - the risk is too high of spasming into place yourself. 110v for a few seconds won't harm you, but if you are unable to break the circuit, 110v for 5 minutes almost certainly WILL.
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>That's like saying that to get a valid sample of traffic you can't measure it on one road, you have to measure it on all roads.
Which is true. Ever heard of "sample size" issues ? One road can only give you a sample of traffic on that one road. If you want a sample for a region you need to check as many roads in that region as possible. The more you include the more valid your study. If you study one road and call it a sample of the traffic in the city then you're study is useless.
I mean do you really think my quite little beach-side road where I live is a valid representative sample of the traffic in the metropolis where I live ? The people who spend 4 hours a day in traffic jams sure as fuck won't agree.
You're own example proves how wrong you are.
The porn is why we use the web. Oh and slashdot.
If you purchased a digital copy of diablo III (as over 2-million people did this week) - then you got it delivered over bittorrent by default (same client-update system that WoW uses).
If you purchased it on DVD (as I did) - the updates and patches still default to bittorrent. Granted you can disable the torrent support and use a direct HTTP download - but that is obviously much, much slower.
Outside of Jewelry ? Good luck with that. You do realize that actual gold coins are priced way outside the average small investor's income... for a year... right ?
Amount of Gold Bullion in the world today: Roughly a cube the size of a tennis court.
Amount of Gold Bullion for which gold certificates are in trade: about 3 such cubes.
None of your claims about gold hold true when you realize that two thirds of the people who think they own gold just have a certificate to a piece of metal that doesn't even EXIST !
More accurately, for every person who actually owns some gold, two other people have legal proof that they are the owners of that same gold.
Turns out that long after kings stopped debasing currency with gold-plated lead corruption didn't end. Corrupt bankers found ways to print gold and sell the same gold to multiple investors.
Sorry pal, but gold is no more "real" as a currency base than paper money or any other kind. Fuck logically speaking bitcoins are a truer currency than gold because at least so far nobody has found a way to fake them or give the same bitcoin to more than one recipient.
That's pretty much what SOPA, PIPA and the like were (the details differ, not the principal). And as you predict - people did argue it was unjust, and thats why SOPA didn't make it onto the statutes.
At least that suggests an upper limit to how far America's population will allow their politicians to be bought. Previously the possibility of such a limit seemed to require a solid grounding in transfinite mathematics to hypothesise.
Well I find that quite a fascinating proposal. X/0 is an unknown infinite (there is no such number as infinity though - we're about 200 years past that idea) but X/X = 1
So which of the two rules should actually apply to X=0 ?
Seems from your post that mathematicians pretty much interchangeably swap...
If MegaUpload could be shut down in the US, then so can this. Of course, that was the other side of the same battle. When the side which can afford politicians are doing it, you can bet if anybody tried to prosecute they'd get some kind of law-change to make it legal to hack civilian computer networks for the purposes of disrupting illegal file-sharing.
You youngsters... I remember telling that joke with 32768.
> For the purposes of the conjecture calling 0 prime (this is non-standard)
Calling 1 a prime is non-standard. Calling 0 a prime is er... stupid. Why ? Because it's not divisible by itself. Nothing is divisible by 0 remember.
What about 2 ? It's even, and it's greater than 1, but it's less than your 3.
>BTW, what country do you live in? I can only guess, and don't have much of a clue where and what tradition you're even talking about.
I live in South Africa, our original court system was the Dutch-Roman system. Since 1994 there were some reforms in the court system, but it's essentially still a Dutch-Roman court base. What changed was that we instituted a judicar-state where the constitutional court is in fact the highest power in the land, not the executive government. This was actually an alien system to both the major parties in the original negotiations (the National Party and the African Nationalist Congress were both nationalist movements - with a strong preference for Westminster government). It got instituted as a compromise since neither party trusted the other enough to want to let a government with them in it be the highest power in the land - so they chose to make government subject to the court.
Well I wasn't really trying to debate which system is better - I think they both have pros and cons. The biggest con of our system is that judges can have too much power and abuse it.
The biggest con of the jury system is that you can play on jurors emotions to get an outcome that really should never have happened (think O.J. here).
What I do like about our system now is that it empowers citizens - judgements have force of law, and judges can create and abolish what we call common law. This put at least some legislative control back in the hands of citizens. Ultimately our constitutional court can actually order parliament to make legislated laws, scrap laws not constitutional and order them to act on constitutional rights. The reason I say this empowers citizens is that anybody can bring a court case.
It's much easier to do that than to try and influence politicians who are too easily bought.
When it works the court system provides our most important guardianship of civil rights. It was a court decision that forced government to legalize gay marriage and provide anti-retrovirals to rape victims for example. When it doesn't work well we get government complaining that "unelected judges should not get to tell elected officials how to govern".
That said - the civil law tradition, at least our version, still has an adversarial trial aspect. It's just that the person you're supposed to convince is a respected and educated authority on the law (again, in theory :P )
Like I said, I see pros and cons to both systems, and I'm not fully sold on either. I was just mentioning that the system I'm familiar with is different from yours so my statement may not be accurate in your country.
There's a brilliant line on this in "The science of discworld" - I won't pretend I can quote it 100% accurately off the top of my head but it goes something like this:
"In the media you will often read that a certain scientist is trying to prove a theory. Maybe it's because journalists are trained in journalism and don't know how science works or maybe it's because journalists are trained in journalism and don't care how science works - but a good scientist never tries to prove her theory, a good scientist tries her best to disprove her theory before somebody else does it for her, failing to disprove it is what makes a theory trustworthy."
Actually... that's pretty solid advice, you're probably right.
Talk about rewriting history... Linus did not "choose the GPL", the first versions of Linux had a completely different license more similar to the creative-commons non-commercial license than to the GPL.
Linus changed to the license after several years. Many of the contributors were unhappy and requested that the non-commercial clause be dropped, Linus then considered that the operating system that his kernel was being used with was almost entirely licensed under the GPL and decided it made sense to change it to the same license.
> but everything you credit him for was a collective effort. Can you name anywone else involved in those projects?
Then we should also not credit Torvalds for the kernel, or Gossling for Java or ... oh shit EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SOFTWARE BIGGER THEN HELLO WORLD WAS WRITTEN BY MULTIPLE PEOPLE !
We credit the people who start something and lead something in the beginning for having done so. This does not detract from the people who contribute - in fact letting them contribute and ensuring their contributions will always be available to them (and others) was RMS's greatest achievement.
You sir, are a trolling fucking moron.
Stallman spoke out against the "think of the children" excuse... you shout: "Look he doesn't want to thin kof the children !"
>He's a anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him
Aah yes, because using a technological tool to save you time and fit in with the way you like to work is the mark of a Luddite right ?
> Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software? If not, he's a hypocrite, because he has called all closed source software an "evil system" that should be avoided at all costs.
Stallman in fact did NOT say "at all costs". I asked him, in person, once what a person should do if his job is impossible to do without proprietary software.
He replied: "Get a new job", - and this is where idiots like you stopped listening, because then he laughed and said the bit you always pretend he never says: "We can't stop doing all the jobs for which free software aren't available or we'll never get anywhere. Just like I had to use a non-free unix to write the first GNU software on. But if you are in that position, and you believe in free software, then you should contribute in whatever ways you can towards assisting projects that aim to create a free software replacement for your needs."
How reasonable, how pragmatic... yes Stallman is insistent, his insistence is the only reason we even HAVE free software operating systems. But he's not nearly the self-defeating dogmatic that people like you always paint him as either. It certainly isn't Stallman's position that anybody should refuse life-saving medical care if there isn't free software in use. He has campaigned to have the control software for pacemakers made free - so that patients' lives aren't at the mercy of corporations but he never said that in the meantime nobody should wear a pacemaker - which is the position you are demanding he take.
The first line is pure ad hominem - whether you like his personality, personal habits or social skills are not in fact remotely relevant to whether he is right about things.
All that aside: the man just got rushed into a hospital - for many of us who know him and share his ideals - this is a big deal, I know this will shock the hell out of you but some of us actually LIKE the guy and care about it. ... but if you are going to do exactly the same thing you accuse him of -that makes you a hypocrite.
A personal attack on the day he got rushed to hospital is really, really poor taste. Now granted Stallman has been known for some poor taste at times as well... you even posted an example of one
LOL - yeah, that was a horrid typo.
> but think about all the times they try and put someone in the cell with a person, and trying and get the person to confess to the crime that they're being held for...
You're aware that they usually put some sort of recording device in there as well, right ? I got several lawyers in my family and they are all clear hearsay is explicitly not allowed except in a few very rare circumstances. But - their knowledge is not of AMERICAN law, so there could be more exceptions there - perhaps because you have a jury system and we have a judge-only system.
We believe that 12 random people simply cannot know the law well enough to give somebody a fair trial.
Then you should look somewhere else.
The greatest medical schools in the world for example are in Switzerland. The best art schools are in France. The best drama schools are in Britain. The best engineering schools are in Germany and Japan.
Actually... while you do have some wonderful universities that have done a great deal of good work, I struggle to think of a single field where yours are generally accepted as "the best in the world".
Well... unless you count the McDonalds trainee program, when it comes to dehumanizing people, destroying their self-worth and teaching them to make really horrible hamburgers - America is definitely the best in the world.
>And oftentimes your friend can be subpoenaed as to the contents of that communication.
To what end ? That's hearsay evidence and wouldn't be admissible anyway.
Let's try to stretch the analogy to where it at least makes sense. Your friend is death, you don't know sign language, so while she was there you communicated by writing to her on little sticky notes.
Now in theory she could be subpoenaed to hand those sticky notes over - at least that's a real written record, so not hearsay anymore and thus proper evidence.
The thing is however, that they are in your, or her, house - where they cannot be simply ceased. A subpeona isn't enough - you need a warrant to obtain documents that are located in a private home.
A twitter stream marked private, and those messages sent using the private-message mechanism should be treated no differently. They are not public information, they are private documents held on private property and should require a warrant from a judge to be handed over, not just a subpoena from a lawyer.
"To predominate" is a verb, "
Yes, it means "Foreplay engaged in by couples into BDSM".
Did you miss the location ? It was NOT slow if you were in South Africa. At that stage it still tended to take a while for US technology to reach the bottom of Africa. Hell, in some cases, it still does.
Hell most corporates here were still running on 10Mbps ethernet at the time.
Actually that's not the most dangerous scenario. The most dangerous electrical shocks are straight through the blood-stream - blood has a much lower resistance than skin - and goes straight over the heart. My father is an electrical engineer - his final thesis included a proof that just 1v straight to the blood is deadly.
Here's what really happens in most electrical shock deaths: the current causes a muscle spasm preventing you from letting go. Now you have voltage over high resistance - so the current isn't fatal. However - voltage against high resistance is known to produce large amounts of heat (that's how stove plates work). The heat starts to burn you, eventually it burns through the skin - and when that happens the voltage goes straight through the bloodstream - which is an excellent conductor - bang, you're dead.
This is why we teach people that if somebody is experiencing electrical shock you should use a non-conductive object (such as a wooden broom) to push him away rather than try to do so with your hands - the risk is too high of spasming into place yourself.
110v for a few seconds won't harm you, but if you are unable to break the circuit, 110v for 5 minutes almost certainly WILL.