And the atheists I've known, for their part, have often rejected Christianity without having a good understanding of it, often naming some element of Christian theology as the reason they can't accept it when it turns out that element is something most mainstream Christian theologians wouldn't say is a legitimate part of Christianity.
I think this has more to do with the fact that many, perhaps even most Christians have no idea what theology is, apply no logic at all to their beliefs, and practice their religion in astoundingly stupid ways. This is why you get fundies that believe in the literal interpretation of the bible, despite the fact that all the sane theologians would tell you that Genesis is clearly a parable. And why you see even intelligent, thoughtful Christians believing silly things like "God is good by definition, thus all God's rules are good, even if there are no obvious reasons for them, and they're clearly about hating people that are different than me," a philosophy that has been proven silly a hundred years ago by real theologians. And then there are people who blindly follow scam artists like Jerry Falwell. Clearly, Mr. Falwell has never paid any attention to theology in any way, shape, or form, or statements like how 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were the result of America making God mad, would never have come out of his mouth.
In other words, if it doesn't work, it's the user's fault. You could spend years trying to get it "just right" before you finally realize that in fact, it does not work.
I don't think that these cracks are helping...if anything, they are enabling people to go ahead and buy a product that is intentionally broken.
Yes, but they are enabling people to go ahead and NOT buy the product that the first product is intentionally broken in a way that it forces you to buy the second product.
In other words, it ensures that their ploy does not work.
The media always gets everything wrong. Quite honestly, I would rather they got it wrong in a way that upsets the public enough to say "Oh no, you're not going to do *that*" in this particular case, rather than getting it wrong in downplaying how much of a threat this is to free speech.
As far as I can tell, with an average difference of about 1% to 2%, that means that about 49% of younger brothers are actually smarter than their older brothers. So this study means *what* exactly? Even a 2% difference over thousands of people is hardly conclusive evidence of anything at all.
I spoke to a guy who does DRM for an online game publisher. Once, they rewrote their algorithm which instantly rendered all existing cracks for the games useless. Sales jumped by 40% that month. Why? surely none of those who cracked the stuff would have bought it anyway?
That proves exactly nothing, because every software publisher that has ever existed has re-written their anti-piracy measures with each minor subversion that has ever been released, nullifying every crack built for every previous version. And ever since the Internet came along, there was a new crack for the new version the very next day.
And their sales didn't always go up by XX% the next month.
As an aside, I recall that in 1989, "Compute!" magazine did a survey of their readers. Over 90% of them had pirated software in the past year. These days, that number is more like about 20 or 30%.
Just as importantly, if Osama *did* have a proper army, there's still no way in hell he can conquer the entire arab world like Mohammed did back in the day. The UN just doesn't allow that, the other arab countries just wouldn't allow that, and the US has too much interest in the region's oil to let it happen. Osama's just the kind of guy who would simply turn off the tap and let America starve.
But, if he can get America to barge into a bunch of countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan, destroy the government and try to install some kind of weak democracy, he can make his own armies in situ to fight against the occupying forces. In the meantime, it's the US that catches all the flak for doing the invading and he just takes over after the smoke clears.
I always vote. But I vote in a way that voices my displeasure with the entire system. I always vote for fringe parties (I live in Canada, so we have them) that have no hope of ever winning. Last time I voted for the Communist party (for the perversity of voting for a party that would take away our right to vote), and next time I think I'll vote Green. The Greens have the added bonus of being radically environmentalist, something that I'm rapidly becoming, but at the same time they still have no hope of winning in any riding, which to me is more important.
Why do I vote this way? All politicians are scum. They all lie, cheat, and steal, and the political process practically demands it. Hell, even the public demands it.
To top that all off, there isn't a single candidate or party that I would actually support on the whole. Conservatives hate me for my environmentalism, atheism and bisexuality. The NDP have their heads in the clouds. The Liberals are corrupt (not that any other party isn't) arrogant and clueless.
Um, firewalling outgoing connections to port 25 to any server but theirs is a *good* thing.
Why? Because there are approximately 5 people on your ISP including you who have real, actual mail servers. One of them is properly configured NOT to be an open relay. And there are 10,000 people on your ISP with virus-laden windows boxen, bypassing their outgoing mail server (so that they can send spam faster) and connecting directly to the foreign server's incoming SMTP port to send spam.
So an ISP reduces the amount of spam coming from their ADSL network by several thousand times simply by specifying which hosts are allowed to make outgoing connections to port 25.
Microsoft started in 1975 with some stolen code on paper tape, and they didn't become a household name overnight, either.
Sure, it took 15 years and a computer revolution at which they were the forefront. It's been what, 12 years since Linus built his little OS for geeks who like to tinker? And where is it now? It's still the OS that geeks like to tinker with.
You see, *I* play (and in fact, am a member of the clan that runs it) Day of Defeat:Source on a server where there are these things called "rules". And people who do not play by these "rules" get banned according to their Steam ID. Seeing as someone in the clan is almost invariably on the server at least 20 hours a day (and some offences can be enforced automatically by the server), this keeps behaviour remarkably civil. People don't spew unending streams of obscenities and hate speech into their mics. They don't grief. They don't spam.
There's really only a few people that do this. Once they're gone for good, the problem goes away. Other people learn that it's not acceptable to grief even if they're having a bad day, and they stop. Or they just don't bother coming back to the server, in which case everyone wins.
Despite their accusations of infringement, they state they would rather do licensing deals instead of any legal action.
That's because legal action takes years (see also: SCO) and does not have any guarantees of return on investment. If they just "make deals" so that authors avoid the hollow legal threats, then they get their money right away. This isn't about being nice to the FOSS authors, even though they spin it that way. I'd bet that it would be an even better investment for these projects to fight these patents in court. The legal fees would probably be less.
plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective
No, plugging these new numbers in makes the cars *appear* much less cost effective. The fact of the matter is that plenty of hybrid owners were actually reaching their posted fuel efficiency ratings, unlike gas-only cars which do not. And whether the car is stopped in traffic or not, a non-hybrid car is still consuming fuel while a hybrid is not. In fact, hybrids do much better in heavy traffic because under a certain speed (35 Km/h for the Prius for instance) it's just running on batteries.
I think the EPA just changed the way these cars are rated because other carmakers complained that the numbers were "unfair".
I really don't see how lower fuel consumption due to turning off the engine while stopped (or driving slow) in traffic constitutes "abuse". In the end, it's still a lower gas bill.
The entire point of the EPA milage guide is to provide a comparison between different cars. Even if they were to do an actual drive through an actual city for their fuel ratings, it will still be different from what *you* get. If you test every car in exactly the same way under controlled conditions, then you will get an even comparison for its fuel usage. It's like taking every model car produced for the American market for exactly the same drive at exactly the same time to determine which one gets better milage. You'd have to violate some laws of space and time to do that in the real world.
The only, and I mean only, reason these things proliferate is because its profitable. This type of scamming is VERY profitable. So, we should be focusing on how to make it a waste of time. That would attack the problem at its root: its profitability.
Cool. I love this idea. I also noticed that plenty of other people are doing it too.
So why are there still 419 scammers around? The problem should be gone by now...
That only worked, because there weren't many females in close proximity. If you interact with them daily, no chemical will help much.
Actually, I know for absolute certain that many antidepressants (SSRIs especially) have the effect of killing your sex drive, even if you're working with people you think are hot.
If a child can learn to defer bowel movement until the appropriate time and place, why can't an adult defer their sexuality until an appropriate time and place?
This is the very nature of the question asked by the article and the scientists researching this problem.
The problem here is "Where is that appropriate time and place?" You're trapped in a two-storey, 580 square foot apartment in the form of a tin can, in absolute isolation from the rest of humanity for two years. Most people will get pretty bitchy if they don't get laid for a couple of months. Putting off sex for two years can cause serious issues between crewmembers, who are already under stress from other issues like boredom, isolation, and the lack of the basic human need to get outside for some fresh air and sunshine.
Repressing people's normal activity like this is a recipe for insanity and murder. That's why they have to ask these questions.
Slashdot Mirror
If atheism is a belief system then not collecting stamps is a hobby.
:)
Consider yourself yoinked.
And the atheists I've known, for their part, have often rejected Christianity without having a good understanding of it, often naming some element of Christian theology as the reason they can't accept it when it turns out that element is something most mainstream Christian theologians wouldn't say is a legitimate part of Christianity.
I think this has more to do with the fact that many, perhaps even most Christians have no idea what theology is, apply no logic at all to their beliefs, and practice their religion in astoundingly stupid ways. This is why you get fundies that believe in the literal interpretation of the bible, despite the fact that all the sane theologians would tell you that Genesis is clearly a parable. And why you see even intelligent, thoughtful Christians believing silly things like "God is good by definition, thus all God's rules are good, even if there are no obvious reasons for them, and they're clearly about hating people that are different than me," a philosophy that has been proven silly a hundred years ago by real theologians. And then there are people who blindly follow scam artists like Jerry Falwell. Clearly, Mr. Falwell has never paid any attention to theology in any way, shape, or form, or statements like how 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were the result of America making God mad, would never have come out of his mouth.
requires careful leveling of the clock
In other words, if it doesn't work, it's the user's fault. You could spend years trying to get it "just right" before you finally realize that in fact, it does not work.
I don't think that these cracks are helping...if anything, they are enabling people to go ahead and buy a product that is intentionally broken.
Yes, but they are enabling people to go ahead and NOT buy the product that the first product is intentionally broken in a way that it forces you to buy the second product.
In other words, it ensures that their ploy does not work.
The media always gets everything wrong. Quite honestly, I would rather they got it wrong in a way that upsets the public enough to say "Oh no, you're not going to do *that*" in this particular case, rather than getting it wrong in downplaying how much of a threat this is to free speech.
As far as I can tell, with an average difference of about 1% to 2%, that means that about 49% of younger brothers are actually smarter than their older brothers. So this study means *what* exactly? Even a 2% difference over thousands of people is hardly conclusive evidence of anything at all.
Aha! So clearly, what we need is a game that features a lot of casual *masochism!* I'm sure that it will be a big hit... at least, with the censors.
I spoke to a guy who does DRM for an online game publisher. Once, they rewrote their algorithm which instantly rendered all existing cracks for the games useless. Sales jumped by 40% that month. Why? surely none of those who cracked the stuff would have bought it anyway?
That proves exactly nothing, because every software publisher that has ever existed has re-written their anti-piracy measures with each minor subversion that has ever been released, nullifying every crack built for every previous version. And ever since the Internet came along, there was a new crack for the new version the very next day.
And their sales didn't always go up by XX% the next month.
As an aside, I recall that in 1989, "Compute!" magazine did a survey of their readers. Over 90% of them had pirated software in the past year. These days, that number is more like about 20 or 30%.
Just as importantly, if Osama *did* have a proper army, there's still no way in hell he can conquer the entire arab world like Mohammed did back in the day. The UN just doesn't allow that, the other arab countries just wouldn't allow that, and the US has too much interest in the region's oil to let it happen. Osama's just the kind of guy who would simply turn off the tap and let America starve.
But, if he can get America to barge into a bunch of countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan, destroy the government and try to install some kind of weak democracy, he can make his own armies in situ to fight against the occupying forces. In the meantime, it's the US that catches all the flak for doing the invading and he just takes over after the smoke clears.
Uh, isn't this exactly what the illiterate would *want* to do?
I always vote. But I vote in a way that voices my displeasure with the entire system. I always vote for fringe parties (I live in Canada, so we have them) that have no hope of ever winning. Last time I voted for the Communist party (for the perversity of voting for a party that would take away our right to vote), and next time I think I'll vote Green. The Greens have the added bonus of being radically environmentalist, something that I'm rapidly becoming, but at the same time they still have no hope of winning in any riding, which to me is more important.
Why do I vote this way? All politicians are scum. They all lie, cheat, and steal, and the political process practically demands it. Hell, even the public demands it.
To top that all off, there isn't a single candidate or party that I would actually support on the whole. Conservatives hate me for my environmentalism, atheism and bisexuality. The NDP have their heads in the clouds. The Liberals are corrupt (not that any other party isn't) arrogant and clueless.
Um, firewalling outgoing connections to port 25 to any server but theirs is a *good* thing.
Why? Because there are approximately 5 people on your ISP including you who have real, actual mail servers. One of them is properly configured NOT to be an open relay. And there are 10,000 people on your ISP with virus-laden windows boxen, bypassing their outgoing mail server (so that they can send spam faster) and connecting directly to the foreign server's incoming SMTP port to send spam.
So an ISP reduces the amount of spam coming from their ADSL network by several thousand times simply by specifying which hosts are allowed to make outgoing connections to port 25.
Microsoft started in 1975 with some stolen code on paper tape, and they didn't become a household name overnight, either.
Sure, it took 15 years and a computer revolution at which they were the forefront. It's been what, 12 years since Linus built his little OS for geeks who like to tinker? And where is it now? It's still the OS that geeks like to tinker with.
You see, *I* play (and in fact, am a member of the clan that runs it) Day of Defeat:Source on a server where there are these things called "rules". And people who do not play by these "rules" get banned according to their Steam ID. Seeing as someone in the clan is almost invariably on the server at least 20 hours a day (and some offences can be enforced automatically by the server), this keeps behaviour remarkably civil. People don't spew unending streams of obscenities and hate speech into their mics. They don't grief. They don't spam.
There's really only a few people that do this. Once they're gone for good, the problem goes away. Other people learn that it's not acceptable to grief even if they're having a bad day, and they stop. Or they just don't bother coming back to the server, in which case everyone wins.
Despite their accusations of infringement, they state they would rather do licensing deals instead of any legal action.
That's because legal action takes years (see also: SCO) and does not have any guarantees of return on investment. If they just "make deals" so that authors avoid the hollow legal threats, then they get their money right away. This isn't about being nice to the FOSS authors, even though they spin it that way. I'd bet that it would be an even better investment for these projects to fight these patents in court. The legal fees would probably be less.
plugging these new numbers in to the equation makes a hybrid much less cost effective
No, plugging these new numbers in makes the cars *appear* much less cost effective. The fact of the matter is that plenty of hybrid owners were actually reaching their posted fuel efficiency ratings, unlike gas-only cars which do not. And whether the car is stopped in traffic or not, a non-hybrid car is still consuming fuel while a hybrid is not. In fact, hybrids do much better in heavy traffic because under a certain speed (35 Km/h for the Prius for instance) it's just running on batteries.
I think the EPA just changed the way these cars are rated because other carmakers complained that the numbers were "unfair".
I really don't see how lower fuel consumption due to turning off the engine while stopped (or driving slow) in traffic constitutes "abuse". In the end, it's still a lower gas bill.
The entire point of the EPA milage guide is to provide a comparison between different cars. Even if they were to do an actual drive through an actual city for their fuel ratings, it will still be different from what *you* get. If you test every car in exactly the same way under controlled conditions, then you will get an even comparison for its fuel usage. It's like taking every model car produced for the American market for exactly the same drive at exactly the same time to determine which one gets better milage. You'd have to violate some laws of space and time to do that in the real world.
Granted, they won't harvest your organs,
I wonder if Scott Adams is reading this. I feel a Dilbert strip coming on...
Perhaps, bureaucracies should also forget. Or paper records. Or diaries. Or newspapers. Or historical records.
No, we should keep all this data intact. It's all very important, no matter how banal it might seem to us right now.
The only, and I mean only, reason these things proliferate is because its profitable. This type of scamming is VERY profitable. So, we should be focusing on how to make it a waste of time. That would attack the problem at its root: its profitability.
Cool. I love this idea. I also noticed that plenty of other people are doing it too.
So why are there still 419 scammers around? The problem should be gone by now...
That only worked, because there weren't many females in close proximity. If you interact with them daily, no chemical will help much.
Actually, I know for absolute certain that many antidepressants (SSRIs especially) have the effect of killing your sex drive, even if you're working with people you think are hot.
Feed them back into the organic system
Um, *yuck*? It's bad enough when you have to *resort* to cannibalism, but planning on it is another thing entirely.
In my experience, geeks actually have a high propensity for being raging perverts. I highly doubt this will work as well as you say.
If a child can learn to defer bowel movement until the appropriate time and place, why can't an adult defer their sexuality until an appropriate time and place?
This is the very nature of the question asked by the article and the scientists researching this problem.
The problem here is "Where is that appropriate time and place?" You're trapped in a two-storey, 580 square foot apartment in the form of a tin can, in absolute isolation from the rest of humanity for two years. Most people will get pretty bitchy if they don't get laid for a couple of months. Putting off sex for two years can cause serious issues between crewmembers, who are already under stress from other issues like boredom, isolation, and the lack of the basic human need to get outside for some fresh air and sunshine.
Repressing people's normal activity like this is a recipe for insanity and murder. That's why they have to ask these questions.