Except Viacom is requesting all of Youtube's records, which means they now not only have a record of who accessed the video's that I've uploaded, but also which videos I've watched, both of which are illegal under the VPPA, and have nothing to do with their lawsuit at all.
>>But claiming that there are domains where science doesn't belong? That's just silly. That's claiming, basically, that there are questions which shouldn't be internally consistent AND agree with external observations. How does that make sense, and how is that superior?
It depends, I suppose, if you define science as the study of empirical truths by hypothesis, testing, and reproduction of results (which is how I define it), or as a sort of general critical thinking strategy about making ones theories correspond with reality (as you do by saying "Science is a mode of thought"). I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion if you're definition is used, and I think you can't really disagree with my conclusion (Science cannot talk about history, except indirectly) if my definition is used.
That said, I think even with your definition, there are areas that science can't really inform (theoretical mathematics, for example, which have no corresponding basis in reality), and nor do scientific truths equal logical truths, as by their very nature they're probabilistic things (a fact which people opposed to evolution use mistakenly all the time). Furthermore, the problem of induction makes statements even as simple as "the sun will rise tomorrow" not necessarily guaranteed (after all, the sun might spontaneously supernova), and the is/ought problem draws a pretty strong line between science and ethics.
I actually very strongly agree with you that science should inform all of the other domains - an ethical stance based on incorrect science should naturally be corrected (for example, some people are vegetarians because they believe the human digestion tract is similar to that of cows, which it quite empathetically isn't) - but ethics also needs to inform religion as well. The pursuit of science - devoid of ethical concerns - was the justification for Mengele, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, and other horrors which results in the formation of IRBs around the country.
My personal belief is that there are different domains in which a specific subject or technique is dominant - math, science, ethics, religion, history, etc., - but that also all of the other domains bump up against each other and inform each other in complicated and messy ways. Definitely not as clean as the NOMA theory, but fairly accurate, and should be pretty useful for people who think that one of the domains should be completely dominant to the others.
>>As soon as the ID crowd can provide proof of any sort to move their take on things from fairy tale category to testable theory, then they can begin teaching it in classrooms.
Surprisingly enough, it wasn't very popular with a number of people who repeatedly beat on the ID isn't falsifiable drum.
Note: I don't believe in ID, but I do think it's possible to turn it into a testable theory. This fact seems lost to most people who can't get it through their fucking tiny skulls that it's possible to talk about both ID and evolution in a rational, scientific fashion.
>>Listen: there are no questions "off limits" to science.
Sure there are. The entire field of history is about trying to ascertain truth (just like science), but it's rather infuriatingly immune to the scientific method, as nobody yet has found a way of putting a 2,000 year dead Julius Caesar in a test tube and making testable, reproducible and falsifiable theories about him.
This is the key point that people that believe that science is the be-all, end-all to epistemology - science is actually fairly proscribed in terms of what sorts of questions it's even capable of answering.
>>Ugh - the NOMA argument.
Think about it this way - science can tell us how the world is, and ethics or religion can discuss the question of how it ought to be. The NOMA argument, while fairly simplistic, is correct in that these are two very different sorts of questions with different methodologies for answering them.
>>But yes, to return to my original point, it's a little harsh to criticise people for changing their opinions on the basis of the available evidence, so long as they are reasonably honest about it, which most peole generally are.
I don't blame those that change their opinions based on the evidence, but those that will come back and say that they knew *all along* he was guilty.
As others said, the Coca Cola translation is slightly different.
But Chinese doesn't really need a katakana - since all mainland Chinese nowadays learn Pinyin (Taiwan is a whole different story, with the bopomofo character set), which uses the English alphabet, half the time they just print the English loan-word in English, with all caps. You and I LOVE LOVE all the time, that sort of thing. In part, this is because creating a character translation for words that people have never seen before would confuse the hell out of them (what is the Chinese translation for Twizzler candy?), but when they do come up with an official translation, they can do it either phonetically or preserving meaning. There's enough sounds in Chinese to represent everything in English, sort of, so they translate Canada as Jia Na Da, but cell phone as shou ji (hand phone), but sometimes I've heard Chinese people translate it phonetically as well (especially before shou ji was settled upon as the formal translation, and it varied between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as well).
I took night classes in Chinese at my local community college. Cheap, great instruction, but only one year offered, which meant I finished the year and then didn't really have any ability to go on, unless I paid thousands to a university to sit in. But a year was enough to be able to do... all right... when I went to China by myself.
>>I'm all for innocent-until-proven, believe me - but he's been PROVEN guilty at this point. Clinging to an idea of his innocence is a weird sort of cognitive dissonance I can't get behind.
Yeah, in the previous Slashdot articles on this case, it was bizarre watching people defend him simply because he wrote a filesystem that some of us use. You're right, it is cognitive dissonance, as the human brain has trouble putting a person in two different boxes for Good and Bad.
Of course, now that he's admittedly guilty, a different mental mechanism will come into play, and half his defenders will post on here that they thought he was guilty all along, and what's weirder, they will actually believe it. Dunno what that phenomena is called - maybe it could be called a false memory.
>>Is it so bloody hard to mention the fact that this is in fact for the ancient Quake 1/2 games, rather than a recent version?
There's still an active dev community for Quake 1/2/3, with clients like FTEQuake adding realtime lighting, bloom, shaders, etc. to these clients. Quakeworld has never looked so good. =)
I dunno, when my roommate stole a bunch of computer equipment, I went to the police, told him his name and current address, and they still didn't care.
I didn't get my stuff back until my Palestinian friend ran into my former roommate at the local grocery store and proceeded to scare the living shit out of him. Got all my stuff back the next day.
Sometimes... it's nice having swarthy friends who joke about blowing stuff up.
In a perfect world, this would serve as a wake-up call to ICANN that the current domain name policies are hideously flawed.
Of course, their heads are so far up their collective asses, though, that they'll just say it was an awesome example of domain tasting by a third party, and all part of the glorious monstrosity they have birthed.
Since the hammer and the feather are classically dropped right next to each other, let's say a foot apart, the vector of the movement of the Earth will point mostly toward the hammer (depending on the ratio of mass) meaning it will still hit first even if they're dropped simultaneously.
>>Also your answer assumes a frame of reference fixed to the earth
Well, the problem posed is, "Which hits the ground first?" or, alternatively, "Which falls faster?" and in both cases, the answer is the hammer.
>>it's just that the question becomes too vague to have a definite answer.
No matter how it's phrased, the hammer will hit the Earth first. I know it sounds a bit pedantic of me to make this distinction, but I've always found it amusing since it's the go-to example most scientifically minded people use to show how science trumps common sense, but (in this case) common sense is correct. (Even if it's accidentally correct.)
>>>>Fact: Objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. >>How exactly is this a fact? At best it's a generalization based on facts involving specific objects. It sounds more like a law.
Moreover, it's wrong. Heavier objects will fall slightly faster since they pull the earth up towards them as they fall.
It's a great example of how we can think we know something that's "proven" by science, but yet still have the ignorant people (that think a hammer falls faster than a feather in a vacuum) actually be right.
>>Why? No-one is forced to spend their money on text messages.
Yes you do - the key point is that receiving TXT messages costs just as much as sending them. (So they charge twice.)
I got TXT spam routinely for about two years, and Verizon charged me a dollar for each one, and refused to refund the money, or do anything about the spammers (which included some of their major partners). Installing a blocker worked, but it was a total PITA, and probably cost me $100 over the two years.
I have a friend whose daughter wrote 7800 TXT messages in one month. Not a typo. After getting a bill for $1,100 and yelling at them for a while, I think she negotiated them down, but it doesn't change the fact that they charged a rather extortionate rate for the service provided. Quantum Meruit and all that.
>>It will extend the availability, but sooner or later there will be too little left
The sun will also run out of energy "sooner or later".
We won't run out of copper or zinc - the price will simply go up, which will make it economical to mine it in places it's not right now, and the cycle will continue. The earth is, believe it or not, a rather large place, and most of the so-called "rare" earth elements occur with the same frequency as copper and zinc. There's a few that are actually rare, but fortunately, we know where they end up.
fMRI has always had issues with the fact that it doesn't measure time-varying signals very well in the brain. Which means that it basically can't track fast brain activity, since it needs 2 to 5 seconds to resolve.
Learned this in the very excellent Brain Hacks book by O'Reilly, which isn't about hacking the brain, really, at all, but just a top to bottom description of how the brain works, with various experiments to demonstrate their points (like optical illusions and such). I highly recommend it.
>>Has the possibility occured to you that you don't know how to type?
Dunno. I taught myself to type from the hunt and peck days onwards... tried learning proper typing in a class in both middle and high school, but I could touch type using my own method up to 80WPM at that point (using a computer program in the class that measured these things), when copying text on the screen. I type only using my index fingers and thumbs, with the ring finger only for backspace, o, and p. Never experienced even a twinge of pain when typing using my method, except when the keyboard was grossly misaligned with my arms.
When trying to type using the "proper" home key method, my wrists would begin to hurt after about five minutes. I believe the extension of fingers up and down from the home keys stresses the tendons in the wrist, and is what causes CTS/RSD. With my method, I never bend my wrists, and only bend my index fingers, which are much stronger and easier to repeatedly flex than the other fingers.
>>And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
Four years into it, a website, and no release? While that does sound like the majority of open source projects... I don't think that's a good thing.
Please. If you can't put together something stable and usable after a month, then you are Doing It Wrong. Start with a small workable tool, release it, open the source, and improve on it from there.
When I wrote CustomTF (an open source mod for Team Fortress for Quake 1, which people still play now 10 years later), I started with a very simple concept of being able to build your own classes in Team Fortress, and put it together, relatively cleanly, in about 48 hours of frenzied coding. This provided the structure that the mod has grown and developed with over the last 10 years, with something like 20 different people adding code and features when it interests them. It's been a very successful project, though it does seem to be winding down now that TF2 is out.
From your web site: "I owe you an apology. I promised Ogg Frog's 1.0 release for August 2006, then February 2007, and here it is August 2007 - a whole year later - and there is still no software for you to download."
Yeah. Looking at your feature list for an unsupported product, it looks like you shot the moon, realized about halfway through that it was way more complicated than you realized and that what you had was basically unusable, and then went and started playing World of Warcraft instead. Happens quite a bit, actually, don't feel bad about it. But at the same time, it's philosophically wrong to say that Open Source projects should be run that way.
It's the impurities in the alcohol that also give hangovers. Drinking Tecate gives me splitting headaches, but other kinds of Mexican beer doesn't, for example.
Google vodka impurities, and you'll see the expensive stuff does have less, but once you pass a certain price breakpoint (maybe around $30, not high) then you're just paying for the brand name. But Schmirnoff, and lord forfend, Ralph's Brand Charcoal-Filtered Vodka, are pretty bad.
There was something like 10,000 black slaveowners in 1860, compared with about 400,000 white slaveowners.
One of the largest slaveowners (in the top 1% of slaveowners) in South Carolina at the time right before the Civil War was a former slave named William Ellison. He was a brilliant guy, who invented a way of sharpening cotton gin blades in a way that they held their edges a lot longer; farmers all the way from Kansas would send their blades to him to be sharpened. Demand for his services grew so much that he ended up buying quite a large number of slaves to work in his machine shops. He (along with another black slaveowning family) got a bench on the floor of the local church, and successfully sued white people for money owed him when they didn't pay up. He was known as a harsh master, bred slaves for sale, and hired slave catchers to bring back runaway slaves.
Things got bad for blacks during the tense months leading up to the Civil War, so he and his family fled to the North, but apparently his sons (college educated in Canada) tried to enlist in the Confederate Army, and the family actually bought a lot of confederate war bonds to support the war effort. After the war ended, their slaves were freed and the bonds were defaulted, bankrupting their family just like all the white plantations.
When I was in Sumter County, the local museum took a group of us out to his house, and we toured his plantation, and visited his grave. Fascinating story, and very different from the common perception of slavery, and black slaveowners (who we perhaps assume bought slaves merely to free them).
Slashdot Mirror
Except Viacom is requesting all of Youtube's records, which means they now not only have a record of who accessed the video's that I've uploaded, but also which videos I've watched, both of which are illegal under the VPPA, and have nothing to do with their lawsuit at all.
You're lucky... all the taped telemarkers that call me call my fax machine.
>>But claiming that there are domains where science doesn't belong? That's just silly. That's claiming, basically, that there are questions which shouldn't be internally consistent AND agree with external observations. How does that make sense, and how is that superior?
It depends, I suppose, if you define science as the study of empirical truths by hypothesis, testing, and reproduction of results (which is how I define it), or as a sort of general critical thinking strategy about making ones theories correspond with reality (as you do by saying "Science is a mode of thought"). I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion if you're definition is used, and I think you can't really disagree with my conclusion (Science cannot talk about history, except indirectly) if my definition is used.
That said, I think even with your definition, there are areas that science can't really inform (theoretical mathematics, for example, which have no corresponding basis in reality), and nor do scientific truths equal logical truths, as by their very nature they're probabilistic things (a fact which people opposed to evolution use mistakenly all the time). Furthermore, the problem of induction makes statements even as simple as "the sun will rise tomorrow" not necessarily guaranteed (after all, the sun might spontaneously supernova), and the is/ought problem draws a pretty strong line between science and ethics.
I actually very strongly agree with you that science should inform all of the other domains - an ethical stance based on incorrect science should naturally be corrected (for example, some people are vegetarians because they believe the human digestion tract is similar to that of cows, which it quite empathetically isn't) - but ethics also needs to inform religion as well. The pursuit of science - devoid of ethical concerns - was the justification for Mengele, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, and other horrors which results in the formation of IRBs around the country.
My personal belief is that there are different domains in which a specific subject or technique is dominant - math, science, ethics, religion, history, etc., - but that also all of the other domains bump up against each other and inform each other in complicated and messy ways. Definitely not as clean as the NOMA theory, but fairly accurate, and should be pretty useful for people who think that one of the domains should be completely dominant to the others.
>>As soon as the ID crowd can provide proof of any sort to move their take on things from fairy tale category to testable theory, then they can begin teaching it in classrooms.
I proposed such a method to turn ID into a falsifiable theory here:
http://slashdot.org/~ShakaUVM/journal/121956
Surprisingly enough, it wasn't very popular with a number of people who repeatedly beat on the ID isn't falsifiable drum.
Note: I don't believe in ID, but I do think it's possible to turn it into a testable theory. This fact seems lost to most people who can't get it through their fucking tiny skulls that it's possible to talk about both ID and evolution in a rational, scientific fashion.
>>Listen: there are no questions "off limits" to science.
Sure there are. The entire field of history is about trying to ascertain truth (just like science), but it's rather infuriatingly immune to the scientific method, as nobody yet has found a way of putting a 2,000 year dead Julius Caesar in a test tube and making testable, reproducible and falsifiable theories about him.
This is the key point that people that believe that science is the be-all, end-all to epistemology - science is actually fairly proscribed in terms of what sorts of questions it's even capable of answering.
>>Ugh - the NOMA argument.
Think about it this way - science can tell us how the world is, and ethics or religion can discuss the question of how it ought to be. The NOMA argument, while fairly simplistic, is correct in that these are two very different sorts of questions with different methodologies for answering them.
>>But yes, to return to my original point, it's a little harsh to criticise people for changing their opinions on the basis of the available evidence, so long as they are reasonably honest about it, which most peole generally are.
I don't blame those that change their opinions based on the evidence, but those that will come back and say that they knew *all along* he was guilty.
Just like your aforementioned priest.
As others said, the Coca Cola translation is slightly different.
But Chinese doesn't really need a katakana - since all mainland Chinese nowadays learn Pinyin (Taiwan is a whole different story, with the bopomofo character set), which uses the English alphabet, half the time they just print the English loan-word in English, with all caps. You and I LOVE LOVE all the time, that sort of thing. In part, this is because creating a character translation for words that people have never seen before would confuse the hell out of them (what is the Chinese translation for Twizzler candy?), but when they do come up with an official translation, they can do it either phonetically or preserving meaning. There's enough sounds in Chinese to represent everything in English, sort of, so they translate Canada as Jia Na Da, but cell phone as shou ji (hand phone), but sometimes I've heard Chinese people translate it phonetically as well (especially before shou ji was settled upon as the formal translation, and it varied between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as well).
I took night classes in Chinese at my local community college. Cheap, great instruction, but only one year offered, which meant I finished the year and then didn't really have any ability to go on, unless I paid thousands to a university to sit in. But a year was enough to be able to do... all right... when I went to China by myself.
>>I'm all for innocent-until-proven, believe me - but he's been PROVEN guilty at this point. Clinging to an idea of his innocence is a weird sort of cognitive dissonance I can't get behind.
Yeah, in the previous Slashdot articles on this case, it was bizarre watching people defend him simply because he wrote a filesystem that some of us use. You're right, it is cognitive dissonance, as the human brain has trouble putting a person in two different boxes for Good and Bad.
Of course, now that he's admittedly guilty, a different mental mechanism will come into play, and half his defenders will post on here that they thought he was guilty all along, and what's weirder, they will actually believe it. Dunno what that phenomena is called - maybe it could be called a false memory.
I actually bought AVG 8.0 (been using the free edition for years and felt guilty), then immediately uninstalled it.
The problem? Crashing my machine left and right. I could reliably crash winamp by opening small files, and other programs acted very very oddly.
Uninstalled, and the problems went away.
>>Is it so bloody hard to mention the fact that this is in fact for the ancient Quake 1/2 games, rather than a recent version?
There's still an active dev community for Quake 1/2/3, with clients like FTEQuake adding realtime lighting, bloom, shaders, etc. to these clients. Quakeworld has never looked so good. =)
Of course, I'd recommend CustomTF. =)
I dunno, when my roommate stole a bunch of computer equipment, I went to the police, told him his name and current address, and they still didn't care.
I didn't get my stuff back until my Palestinian friend ran into my former roommate at the local grocery store and proceeded to scare the living shit out of him. Got all my stuff back the next day.
Sometimes... it's nice having swarthy friends who joke about blowing stuff up.
In a perfect world, this would serve as a wake-up call to ICANN that the current domain name policies are hideously flawed.
Of course, their heads are so far up their collective asses, though, that they'll just say it was an awesome example of domain tasting by a third party, and all part of the glorious monstrosity they have birthed.
Since the hammer and the feather are classically dropped right next to each other, let's say a foot apart, the vector of the movement of the Earth will point mostly toward the hammer (depending on the ratio of mass) meaning it will still hit first even if they're dropped simultaneously.
>>Also your answer assumes a frame of reference fixed to the earth
Well, the problem posed is, "Which hits the ground first?" or, alternatively, "Which falls faster?" and in both cases, the answer is the hammer.
>>it's just that the question becomes too vague to have a definite answer.
No matter how it's phrased, the hammer will hit the Earth first. I know it sounds a bit pedantic of me to make this distinction, but I've always found it amusing since it's the go-to example most scientifically minded people use to show how science trumps common sense, but (in this case) common sense is correct. (Even if it's accidentally correct.)
>>>>Fact: Objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass.
>>How exactly is this a fact? At best it's a generalization based on facts involving specific objects. It sounds more like a law.
Moreover, it's wrong. Heavier objects will fall slightly faster since they pull the earth up towards them as they fall.
It's a great example of how we can think we know something that's "proven" by science, but yet still have the ignorant people (that think a hammer falls faster than a feather in a vacuum) actually be right.
Very nice.
But yeah, it's an awesome book.
>>(PROTIP: The average cost of petrol in the UK is just under $9 per US gallon.)
Damn!
Good thing you guys use litres over there -- they're much smaller.
>>Why? No-one is forced to spend their money on text messages.
Yes you do - the key point is that receiving TXT messages costs just as much as sending them. (So they charge twice.)
I got TXT spam routinely for about two years, and Verizon charged me a dollar for each one, and refused to refund the money, or do anything about the spammers (which included some of their major partners). Installing a blocker worked, but it was a total PITA, and probably cost me $100 over the two years.
I have a friend whose daughter wrote 7800 TXT messages in one month. Not a typo. After getting a bill for $1,100 and yelling at them for a while, I think she negotiated them down, but it doesn't change the fact that they charged a rather extortionate rate for the service provided. Quantum Meruit and all that.
>>It will extend the availability, but sooner or later there will be too little left
The sun will also run out of energy "sooner or later".
We won't run out of copper or zinc - the price will simply go up, which will make it economical to mine it in places it's not right now, and the cycle will continue. The earth is, believe it or not, a rather large place, and most of the so-called "rare" earth elements occur with the same frequency as copper and zinc. There's a few that are actually rare, but fortunately, we know where they end up.
fMRI has always had issues with the fact that it doesn't measure time-varying signals very well in the brain. Which means that it basically can't track fast brain activity, since it needs 2 to 5 seconds to resolve.
Doppler Sonography by contrast provides a way of measuring neural activity with a high degree of resolution in the time domain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17290143
Learned this in the very excellent Brain Hacks book by O'Reilly, which isn't about hacking the brain, really, at all, but just a top to bottom description of how the brain works, with various experiments to demonstrate their points (like optical illusions and such). I highly recommend it.
>>Has the possibility occured to you that you don't know how to type?
Dunno. I taught myself to type from the hunt and peck days onwards... tried learning proper typing in a class in both middle and high school, but I could touch type using my own method up to 80WPM at that point (using a computer program in the class that measured these things), when copying text on the screen. I type only using my index fingers and thumbs, with the ring finger only for backspace, o, and p. Never experienced even a twinge of pain when typing using my method, except when the keyboard was grossly misaligned with my arms.
When trying to type using the "proper" home key method, my wrists would begin to hurt after about five minutes. I believe the extension of fingers up and down from the home keys stresses the tendons in the wrist, and is what causes CTS/RSD. With my method, I never bend my wrists, and only bend my index fingers, which are much stronger and easier to repeatedly flex than the other fingers.
>>And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.
Four years into it, a website, and no release? While that does sound like the majority of open source projects... I don't think that's a good thing.
Please. If you can't put together something stable and usable after a month, then you are Doing It Wrong. Start with a small workable tool, release it, open the source, and improve on it from there.
When I wrote CustomTF (an open source mod for Team Fortress for Quake 1, which people still play now 10 years later), I started with a very simple concept of being able to build your own classes in Team Fortress, and put it together, relatively cleanly, in about 48 hours of frenzied coding. This provided the structure that the mod has grown and developed with over the last 10 years, with something like 20 different people adding code and features when it interests them. It's been a very successful project, though it does seem to be winding down now that TF2 is out.
From your web site:
"I owe you an apology. I promised Ogg Frog's 1.0 release for August 2006, then February 2007, and here it is August 2007 - a whole year later - and there is still no software for you to download."
Yeah. Looking at your feature list for an unsupported product, it looks like you shot the moon, realized about halfway through that it was way more complicated than you realized and that what you had was basically unusable, and then went and started playing World of Warcraft instead. Happens quite a bit, actually, don't feel bad about it. But at the same time, it's philosophically wrong to say that Open Source projects should be run that way.
>>I don't know, I've never even seen a woman programmer.
So you're saying Brooks should do a sequel: The Mythical Woman Month?
It's the impurities in the alcohol that also give hangovers. Drinking Tecate gives me splitting headaches, but other kinds of Mexican beer doesn't, for example.
Google vodka impurities, and you'll see the expensive stuff does have less, but once you pass a certain price breakpoint (maybe around $30, not high) then you're just paying for the brand name. But Schmirnoff, and lord forfend, Ralph's Brand Charcoal-Filtered Vodka, are pretty bad.
>>As for black slaveowners in America: Citation please. (i.e. I call B.S.)
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Masters-Michael-P-Johnson/dp/0393019063
There was something like 10,000 black slaveowners in 1860, compared with about 400,000 white slaveowners.
One of the largest slaveowners (in the top 1% of slaveowners) in South Carolina at the time right before the Civil War was a former slave named William Ellison. He was a brilliant guy, who invented a way of sharpening cotton gin blades in a way that they held their edges a lot longer; farmers all the way from Kansas would send their blades to him to be sharpened. Demand for his services grew so much that he ended up buying quite a large number of slaves to work in his machine shops. He (along with another black slaveowning family) got a bench on the floor of the local church, and successfully sued white people for money owed him when they didn't pay up. He was known as a harsh master, bred slaves for sale, and hired slave catchers to bring back runaway slaves.
Things got bad for blacks during the tense months leading up to the Civil War, so he and his family fled to the North, but apparently his sons (college educated in Canada) tried to enlist in the Confederate Army, and the family actually bought a lot of confederate war bonds to support the war effort. After the war ended, their slaves were freed and the bonds were defaulted, bankrupting their family just like all the white plantations.
When I was in Sumter County, the local museum took a group of us out to his house, and we toured his plantation, and visited his grave. Fascinating story, and very different from the common perception of slavery, and black slaveowners (who we perhaps assume bought slaves merely to free them).