safety, come on, get real wer're talking about the country in the western world with the highest
(no competition...) rate of murder and violent crime.
True, but on the other hand no wars have been fought on U.S. soil (continental, anyway) for almost 200 years. You can't really say that about much of the rest of the world. So probably over the last 200 years, the total number of people killed within the boundaries of the U.S. may be lower than a similar-sized populated region of the rest of the world.
In school they learn that World War 2 started with Pearl
Harbor, not with Germanys invasion of Poland and US entered after Pearl Harbor.
I imagine residents of the Sudentenenland and Austria look down on your history education as "domb" too, since they were attacked before Poland. I don't think it's unreasonable for the citizenry of a country to commonly understand the beginning of a war to be when that country was first attacked. Especially since the cause of World War II was really rooted in the politics and economics of the time, and even the end of the preceding world war.
Good point - the New South is taking off in a big way. Although I'm not sure that's the same kind of uprising that the aforementioned sons of the Confederacy were thinking of:) After this winter so far in Chicago, I know I'd rather be in Georgia or Texas right now (one of the non-icy parts, please).
The Constitution originally only applied to the relationships between the states and the federal government, and the makeup of the federal government. The Bill of Rights added protections for individuals, but they still only define the relationship between individuals and the government. Thus the Constitution only applies to the government in the sense that it places restrictions on the actions the government may take, such as censoring speech, the press, etc. It applies to all people only in the sense that they interact with the government. Interactions of people with each other or with corporations, etc. are governed under state or federal law (for example, murder is illegal, etc.) but are not part of the Constitution.
I agree with your summation on Yahoo, though - I was sorry to see that they caved, but I suppose they were unlikely to abandon their business in France just to defend a few people in the U.S. with Nazi armbands to sell. Really there's no story here, although it feels like a moral defeat.
Actually, the "freedom of the press" does refer to the right of the people to publish without government censorship. It didn't mean that Benjamin Franklin had to publish anything you asked him to.
The real issue here is not individual freedom to publish, which is alive and well in the U.S.. The problem is that the government of France is blackmailing a U.S.-based corporation into meeting the standards of French law within the U.S. in order to be able to do business in France.
Censorship is bad, don't take me wrong, but free speech is not exactly the most important basic
human right out there. It needs to be balanced with others, like for instance the right to life,
dammit, and that right isn't furthered by the idiots who stand at the next street corner and shout
"kill the f*cking foreigners".
I don't see how saying anything on a street corner is depriving anyone of life, unless maybe you told someone to step out there when there was a bus coming:) Speech is speech; it isn't action. Killing someone does affect their right to life, but just speaking about it does nothing. So when you compare the value of freedom of speech versus the nonexistent damage that such a freedom would cause in this case, I would say that freedom of speech is pretty damn important. (Ignoring cases like shouting "Fire" in a theater or espionage, of course - in those cases speech actually can immediately threaten lives.)
And to be fair, I can't see how anyone in America can imagine they have any right to lecture the
French on how to deal with (neo-)Nazis, since their experience 50 years ago was ENTIRELY
different...
Well, let's check the score:
France - conquered and/or capitulated to Nazis (depending on whose history you believe, but Vichy has to count for something), citizens killed by Nazis, now has draconian regulations of all things Nazi (and we all know how making things forbidden drives the young people away).
The U.S. - never conquered by Nazis, citizens killed by Nazis, currently has no regulations on Nazis freedom of speech (thus ensuring that everybody knows what a neo-Nazi really is, so that they get laughed out of every town they're in).
Sure, the final verdict on resisting Nazism isn't in yet, but I bet 50 more years of the same approaches will leave neo-Nazis in the U.S. a forgotten bunch of reactionaries (like all those nuts who think The South Will Rise Again) and neo-Nazis in France an underground known-subversive group that's essentially a new kind of gang for all the young hoodlums to join. I know where I'd rather live...
P.S. The correct moderation for this is ~maybe off-topic. Definitely not flamebait, though.
I dunno, that stormtrooper armor didn't seem to repel blaster fire very well, wasn't garbage-compactor-monster proof, and certainly didn't help their aim much:) The storm troopers versus the rebels always seemed like the British "redcoats" versus the American colonists to me - just having the cool uniforms doesn't help you fight much better.
Boba Fett did have some cool stuff, although IIRC it wasn't exactly Imperial general issue...
Y'know, I was going to make just such a comment as a P.S., but I hit "Submit" too soon. Oh well. A -1, RT(F)FAQ moderation would be great - for a while I had stopped responding to posts with the common inaccuracies, but I was bored today and so hit this one.
Wow, too bad you weren't advizing Unisys or Fraunhofer - then they wouldn't have neglected enforcement of their patents (on LZW compression and mp3 encoding, respectively) only to turn around and begin enforcement just as those techniques are widely embraced. That sure was a poor investment on their part:)
On a more serious note, I believe you're thinking of trademarks, which you can lose if you neglect to enforce them and your trademark becomes "common usage".
All other things being equal, a clean-room implementation would only protect you against claims of copyright infringement, not patent suits. Clean-room just ensures that you aren't using any of Apple's work, but you could still infringe on their patent if you wrote your own implementation that works in the same way.
There's a difference between abhorring the "national institutions of churches" (such as the Church of England for example) as Paine did, and believing that there is no God. The large majority of the founding fathers of the U.S. believed in God, but not in a national religion. From this perspective it looks like they were right - the incidence of huge wars over religion (or even in the name of religion, if you believe that most of the previous religious conflicts were really conflicts over money, land, etc.) has decreased significantly in the last 250 years as most nations moved away from having national religions towards allowing multiple religious beliefs for their citizens.
On another note, how is it more foolish to state that there is no God in the absence of proof, than to state that there is a God in the absence of proof? Belief in God is motivated by faith, not fact, and so the worst you can say about someone who does not believe in God is that they don't share the same faith as you do. You can't prove God's existence either way, so you can't really call someone a fool for disagreeing with you on the topic (which the original poster wasn't really doing - see above).
Hmmm, I've never heard "platform" used in that way, but I could see how that would make sense. However, I retain my argument against "Space Invaders", "Asteroids", etc. since they were not PC games.
Which article were you reading? There were statistics (including cycle counts), comparisons of compiled code, and in-depth reasons for the points that were made. I am not a processor guru and so I'm not sure if they were all good reasons, but there was a large amount of technical backup for the claims that were made. Did you not read past the first section (anti-Intel invective) or the second section (a brief history of PC microprocessors)?
True, the anti-Intel bias was a little disconcerting, but that's because I think you should separate out the technical arguments from the name-calling, and consolidate all of the "boycott Intel" and "Intel engineers are idiots" at the end. Others feel differently, apparently:)
As a CEO, you really should get hip to this thing we call "sarcasm", 'cause that's what the previous poster was using.
Re:GPL will kill it (not a troll)(yes it is)
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 1
Yes, this was a troll:
Again this sad but the truth. The average user uses windows or a MAC not Linux. Becasue this
project is GPL it will never be seen by these people. Since these people won't see it they wont use
it. It will eventually lead to a small group of developers working on the project and despite it's
technical merrits, making no headway in getting it out to the public.
In fact, there are plenty of GPL'd programs used on Windows, and GPL'd programs are not restricted to use under Linux. In one sense you're right, though: most Windows users don't run a lot of GPL'd software. But this is because it doesn't come bundled from Dell/Microsoft, not because it isn't available.
I might also add that plenty of new technology has been developed based on technical merit by a small group of developers, and gone on to change the world: the web server and web browser, even Napster for instance.
That's annoying - I posted a reply a few hours ago, and now it isn't here.
As I was going to say, at the time I read the Cryptome article it did not have that attribution, and when I reloaded it in Netscape it still did not. I had to refresh the page rather than reloading from the cached copy to see the update you mention, so it looks like it was originally posted w/o attribution, and then attribution to the National Review was added.
I agree - in fact, when running distributed computing across untrusted clients, redundant results checking is the only way to go. Actually, originally I argued that they could even support open source SETI@Home clients if they used sufficient redundancy in the results checking, combined with spot checks of some blocks by the "official" client. Hasn't happened yet, though:)
Even if you believe the modern scientific dogma
about evolution, why should any ET culture be further advanced than our own? If the universe is
"only" 15-20 billion years old, and those other life forms would be chemically similar to us (hey,
that's as reasonable as any other postulate here), they'd require the same elements available, which
would mean the same stellar processes (current theories require a few cycles of stellar formation
and nova to provide elements above Lithium), and would take the same time to form. If they're
out there, it seems more reasonable to think they'd be "only" as advanced as we are.
Think of how far human society and technology has advanced in the past 1000 years (since the Dark Ages). Now imagine that Rome or Greece had never fallen, or that the ancient Chinese empires had continued their technological advances and expanded outward to become a world power at that time. Our species could have reached its current level of development by 1300 or so, and considering how the rate of change accelerates, would be almost an entirely different species by the present day.
My point is that technological change accelerates quickly, and any other life forms would have to have their histories work out in exactly the right manner to have a civilization at our level right now (this isn't to say that the life form itself isn't advanced - humans have probably had the requisite intelligence since more-or-less prehistoric times, just not the tools and knowledge to go with it). Almost any life forms that we find in the Universe will either be grinding out the millions of years necessary to evolve sufficient brains and manipulative organs, or have already passed through their relatively brief period of technological advancement (it's really only been 10000 years for us, after all) and moved on to What's Next. I hope they'll still want to talk to us at that point, but in my heart I doubt it.
what would you think if you were running
dist.net client for 3 years doing rc5 cracking and d.net suddenly discontinues the project. most of
users would switch to "more trustful" project because they dont want their work to be discarded.
As opposed to SETI@Home, which in the past has provided already-searched blocks to clients to search again? Not that I necessarily have a problem with redundancy, but I got the impression at the time that nobody knew this was going on and there was some upset about the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but on the other hand no wars have been fought on U.S. soil (continental, anyway) for almost 200 years. You can't really say that about much of the rest of the world. So probably over the last 200 years, the total number of people killed within the boundaries of the U.S. may be lower than a similar-sized populated region of the rest of the world.
I imagine residents of the Sudentenenland and Austria look down on your history education as "domb" too, since they were attacked before Poland. I don't think it's unreasonable for the citizenry of a country to commonly understand the beginning of a war to be when that country was first attacked. Especially since the cause of World War II was really rooted in the politics and economics of the time, and even the end of the preceding world war.
Good point - the New South is taking off in a big way. Although I'm not sure that's the same kind of uprising that the aforementioned sons of the Confederacy were thinking of :) After this winter so far in Chicago, I know I'd rather be in Georgia or Texas right now (one of the non-icy parts, please).
The Constitution originally only applied to the relationships between the states and the federal government, and the makeup of the federal government. The Bill of Rights added protections for individuals, but they still only define the relationship between individuals and the government. Thus the Constitution only applies to the government in the sense that it places restrictions on the actions the government may take, such as censoring speech, the press, etc. It applies to all people only in the sense that they interact with the government. Interactions of people with each other or with corporations, etc. are governed under state or federal law (for example, murder is illegal, etc.) but are not part of the Constitution.
I agree with your summation on Yahoo, though - I was sorry to see that they caved, but I suppose they were unlikely to abandon their business in France just to defend a few people in the U.S. with Nazi armbands to sell. Really there's no story here, although it feels like a moral defeat.
Actually, the "freedom of the press" does refer to the right of the people to publish without government censorship. It didn't mean that Benjamin Franklin had to publish anything you asked him to.
The real issue here is not individual freedom to publish, which is alive and well in the U.S.. The problem is that the government of France is blackmailing a U.S.-based corporation into meeting the standards of French law within the U.S. in order to be able to do business in France.
I don't see how saying anything on a street corner is depriving anyone of life, unless maybe you told someone to step out there when there was a bus coming :) Speech is speech; it isn't action. Killing someone does affect their right to life, but just speaking about it does nothing. So when you compare the value of freedom of speech versus the nonexistent damage that such a freedom would cause in this case, I would say that freedom of speech is pretty damn important. (Ignoring cases like shouting "Fire" in a theater or espionage, of course - in those cases speech actually can immediately threaten lives.)
Well, let's check the score:
Sure, the final verdict on resisting Nazism isn't in yet, but I bet 50 more years of the same approaches will leave neo-Nazis in the U.S. a forgotten bunch of reactionaries (like all those nuts who think The South Will Rise Again) and neo-Nazis in France an underground known-subversive group that's essentially a new kind of gang for all the young hoodlums to join. I know where I'd rather live...
P.S. The correct moderation for this is ~maybe off-topic. Definitely not flamebait, though.
I dunno, that stormtrooper armor didn't seem to repel blaster fire very well, wasn't garbage-compactor-monster proof, and certainly didn't help their aim much :) The storm troopers versus the rebels always seemed like the British "redcoats" versus the American colonists to me - just having the cool uniforms doesn't help you fight much better.
Boba Fett did have some cool stuff, although IIRC it wasn't exactly Imperial general issue...
CmdrTaco should have known that the dimensions would have to be 1x4x9 - how hard is it to remember 1^2 x 2^2 x 3^2 if you've seen the movie?
Y'know, I was going to make just such a comment as a P.S., but I hit "Submit" too soon. Oh well. A -1, RT(F)FAQ moderation would be great - for a while I had stopped responding to posts with the common inaccuracies, but I was bored today and so hit this one.
Wow, too bad you weren't advizing Unisys or Fraunhofer - then they wouldn't have neglected enforcement of their patents (on LZW compression and mp3 encoding, respectively) only to turn around and begin enforcement just as those techniques are widely embraced. That sure was a poor investment on their part :)
On a more serious note, I believe you're thinking of trademarks, which you can lose if you neglect to enforce them and your trademark becomes "common usage".
All other things being equal, a clean-room implementation would only protect you against claims of copyright infringement, not patent suits. Clean-room just ensures that you aren't using any of Apple's work, but you could still infringe on their patent if you wrote your own implementation that works in the same way.
There's a difference between abhorring the "national institutions of churches" (such as the Church of England for example) as Paine did, and believing that there is no God. The large majority of the founding fathers of the U.S. believed in God, but not in a national religion. From this perspective it looks like they were right - the incidence of huge wars over religion (or even in the name of religion, if you believe that most of the previous religious conflicts were really conflicts over money, land, etc.) has decreased significantly in the last 250 years as most nations moved away from having national religions towards allowing multiple religious beliefs for their citizens.
On another note, how is it more foolish to state that there is no God in the absence of proof, than to state that there is a God in the absence of proof? Belief in God is motivated by faith, not fact, and so the worst you can say about someone who does not believe in God is that they don't share the same faith as you do. You can't prove God's existence either way, so you can't really call someone a fool for disagreeing with you on the topic (which the original poster wasn't really doing - see above).
Not to mention "Farewell to the Master", the short story that was in its own way a whole lot cooler than The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Aha, once again I'm fooled by the /. headline. D'oh!
Hmmm, I've never heard "platform" used in that way, but I could see how that would make sense. However, I retain my argument against "Space Invaders", "Asteroids", etc. since they were not PC games.
Most of the games you listed aren't PC games, and thus couldn't be included in any list of the "15 most influential PC games".
Perhaps because the article was about PC games, not platform games? That's just a thought though...
Which article were you reading? There were statistics (including cycle counts), comparisons of compiled code, and in-depth reasons for the points that were made. I am not a processor guru and so I'm not sure if they were all good reasons, but there was a large amount of technical backup for the claims that were made. Did you not read past the first section (anti-Intel invective) or the second section (a brief history of PC microprocessors)?
True, the anti-Intel bias was a little disconcerting, but that's because I think you should separate out the technical arguments from the name-calling, and consolidate all of the "boycott Intel" and "Intel engineers are idiots" at the end. Others feel differently, apparently :)
The Catcher in the Rye was more than enough IMHO; if I'd known him at the time I'd have paid him NOT to write it :)
As a CEO, you really should get hip to this thing we call "sarcasm", 'cause that's what the previous poster was using.
Yes, this was a troll:
In fact, there are plenty of GPL'd programs used on Windows, and GPL'd programs are not restricted to use under Linux. In one sense you're right, though: most Windows users don't run a lot of GPL'd software. But this is because it doesn't come bundled from Dell/Microsoft, not because it isn't available.
I might also add that plenty of new technology has been developed based on technical merit by a small group of developers, and gone on to change the world: the web server and web browser, even Napster for instance.
That's annoying - I posted a reply a few hours ago, and now it isn't here.
As I was going to say, at the time I read the Cryptome article it did not have that attribution, and when I reloaded it in Netscape it still did not. I had to refresh the page rather than reloading from the cached copy to see the update you mention, so it looks like it was originally posted w/o attribution, and then attribution to the National Review was added.
I agree - in fact, when running distributed computing across untrusted clients, redundant results checking is the only way to go. Actually, originally I argued that they could even support open source SETI@Home clients if they used sufficient redundancy in the results checking, combined with spot checks of some blocks by the "official" client. Hasn't happened yet, though :)
Think of how far human society and technology has advanced in the past 1000 years (since the Dark Ages). Now imagine that Rome or Greece had never fallen, or that the ancient Chinese empires had continued their technological advances and expanded outward to become a world power at that time. Our species could have reached its current level of development by 1300 or so, and considering how the rate of change accelerates, would be almost an entirely different species by the present day.
My point is that technological change accelerates quickly, and any other life forms would have to have their histories work out in exactly the right manner to have a civilization at our level right now (this isn't to say that the life form itself isn't advanced - humans have probably had the requisite intelligence since more-or-less prehistoric times, just not the tools and knowledge to go with it). Almost any life forms that we find in the Universe will either be grinding out the millions of years necessary to evolve sufficient brains and manipulative organs, or have already passed through their relatively brief period of technological advancement (it's really only been 10000 years for us, after all) and moved on to What's Next. I hope they'll still want to talk to us at that point, but in my heart I doubt it.
As opposed to SETI@Home, which in the past has provided already-searched blocks to clients to search again? Not that I necessarily have a problem with redundancy, but I got the impression at the time that nobody knew this was going on and there was some upset about the issue.