Actually, you're the one doing the semantic shuffling. His point is valid precisely because he's using the common definition of obscurity (that which is hidden), whereas you're using
> Security by obscurity generally means you're relying on the adversary to be ill-informed about some aspect of the crypto which wouldn't be a problem
> for him to know about in a "real" cryptosystem, and/or extremely limited in computational power.
Discussing 'security by obscurity' is hardly a common topic anyway.
Hate to drag you out of 2007, but your criticisms are out of date. Who cares if it sucked then, the point is that they have changed it and it's easily the best UK TV streaming site.
You're also just outright wrong on the Doctor Who front. Go to the iPlayer, search Doctor Who, bam, list of episode titles and numbers.
Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Linux? After all, isn't it loosely based on MINIX version 1.1 still? What's the point?
For Unix-based development you can fire up vim or emacs without paying a dime and those are based on the Hurd, correct?
Unless Linux has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 1991-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...
The iPlayer changed largely due to the introduction of competent coders who understood what people wanted. The BBC has a public service remit, so yes, having a lot of people watch it is the definition of success - and if it's interface problems are so bad, why have the other channel's streaming services aped it?
No, when the limit is reached the programs themselves will be made better. Scraping an extra 10mb on top of your 8gb of RAM won't help you run anything. You're labouring under the delusion that all that tweaking was to get extra performance from your PC, when in fact it was more to do with the terrible DOS base memory model which meant that you needed to fiddle no matter how much memory you had outside the first 640k.
Like many slashdotters, I admin Windows XP, Server 08, OSX, and linux (as desktop and server) every working day. When I say that Windows sucks, I'm in a position to know...
...how windows worked 10 years ago when XP was modern. Awesome.
You evidently know nothing of British politics. The Liberal Democrats are descended from the Liberals, who were where Labour are now at the start of the last century.
Actually I'm agnostic. I was atheist, but the issue of morality is a pain in the arse and I don't *want* to live in a world where there is no right or wrong, just power and the will to enforce it. That's kind of shitty. If morality is law and law is a process for keeping society stable, morality is entirely functional. Morality/law will try to keep a person from committing a murder, but it doesn't judge them for it. The murderer would have guilt proven and a punishment assigned, but the punishment is just the price of going against society's will. Even more worryingly, a murderer who managed to hide it sufficiently well that the law did not notice would be morally sound.
It's interesting that you'd bring up the golden rule there - do unto others etc, especially as it has a very religious undertone and was mainly fleshed out by Kant, a Christian.
Pro-abortion arguments constantly allow the conclusion to slip into the argument. Why yes, mindless tissue is not a child. But what is a mind? When does the egg cease being mindless tissue and start being a mind? This is the question being asked, and for all you said gray areas aren't problematic, you didn't offer any backing up for that, you just stated it. The gray area *is* the problem.
I'm not even arguing against abortion as such, just in favour of coherent arguments. There is a gray area, yes, and saying that life begins at conception is arbitrary. But whatever limit you place will be arbitrary, how is a 'safe' limit any worse than a limit which accepts the possibility that you might be killing another sentient being?
Oh man, you wrote about 100 lines of argument from absurdity then cut it off at a ridiculously vague point. The problem with your argument is that it works all the way up until the child is about 3. Is killing children fine? Your argument justifies it. "has left the womb" is just as arbitrary as "has been fertilised".
Fun exercise: Tell me precisely when the fetus stops being a fetus and starts being a baby. When you've done that, start removing stones and tell me when it's no longer a pile.
His analogy was retarded. There is no argument to be made here - if the situation were analogous, there wouldn't be a need for it because you could swap 'alien' for 'baby'. What is actually going on there is the tacit assumption that a developing baby doesn't count as a human. If that's your argument, you should say it. Don't pussy-foot around saying what you mean because that belies a lack of faith in your own reasoning.
As for your own argument, one of your initial assumptions is "If you dispose of pre-sentient tissue in your body, an early undeveloped human or alien fetus, that is a complete non-issue.". Many would disagree. It's not surprising you can construct a compelling argument for abortion when that's one of your starting points.
Hey, this makes total sense except for the fact that THE ONLY THING THE ANALOGY INTRODUCED WAS THAT THE BABY IS NO LONGER HUMAN. Well fucking done there champ, that's excellent.
So you're walking down the street when you see a HUGE ALIEN. You stab it to death hurriedly. And these self-righteous bastards want to try you for murder!
Equally, I don't think people should pay other people to sit around and have kids, or at the very least there should be diminishing amounts of support for the additional children and perhaps the suggestion of some kind of reversible sterilization.
When talking about child benefits, it's important to think of them in terms of the children benefiting, rather than the parents, lest what sounds reasonable from one angle is actually indisputably evil from the other. Here, you've said "I'm sorry, but as you are the third child from your parents you won't be going to college like your brothers. Sucks to be you, pick better parents next time."
... he values his principles more than he does development speed, ease of use, profits, or being able to use the latest shiny thing from MS.
You hit the nail squarely with that comment: Stallman values ethics more than he does profit, even his own, and the "entrepreneurs" of the world who have a reverse value system utterly despise him for it. Can we agree that Stallman is a talented man who, in some parallel dimension, could have made quite a lot of money for himself? He hasn't though, precisely because he doesn't value that extreme wealth.
To paraphrase Sartre, why would you attribute to him the capacity to do exactly what he did not do?
Or is the guy who wrote this completely and utterly nuts, in every way? I don't even need to cite this, just visit the labyrinth site and wait till your mind melts.
Police tell organiser to ask anyone else thinking of coming not to, organiser refuses, gets arrested for making a dangerous situation worse. Seems kinda reasonable once you get past the ridiculously OTT OP.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you're the one doing the semantic shuffling. His point is valid precisely because he's using the common definition of obscurity (that which is hidden), whereas you're using
> Security by obscurity generally means you're relying on the adversary to be ill-informed about some aspect of the crypto which wouldn't be a problem
> for him to know about in a "real" cryptosystem, and/or extremely limited in computational power.
Discussing 'security by obscurity' is hardly a common topic anyway.
Hate to drag you out of 2007, but your criticisms are out of date. Who cares if it sucked then, the point is that they have changed it and it's easily the best UK TV streaming site.
You're also just outright wrong on the Doctor Who front. Go to the iPlayer, search Doctor Who, bam, list of episode titles and numbers.
Reading all of these comments and then seeing them modded as Troll or as Flamebait. When actually the comments are pretty much correct. Who really uses Linux? After all, isn't it loosely based on MINIX version 1.1 still? What's the point?
For Unix-based development you can fire up vim or emacs without paying a dime and those are based on the Hurd, correct?
Unless Linux has upped the ante and has actually moved beyond 1991-era frameworks I don't see its relevance...
Ah, I see what you're saying!
The iPlayer changed largely due to the introduction of competent coders who understood what people wanted. The BBC has a public service remit, so yes, having a lot of people watch it is the definition of success - and if it's interface problems are so bad, why have the other channel's streaming services aped it?
No, when the limit is reached the programs themselves will be made better. Scraping an extra 10mb on top of your 8gb of RAM won't help you run anything. You're labouring under the delusion that all that tweaking was to get extra performance from your PC, when in fact it was more to do with the terrible DOS base memory model which meant that you needed to fiddle no matter how much memory you had outside the first 640k.
Like many slashdotters, I admin Windows XP, Server 08, OSX, and linux (as desktop and server) every working day. When I say that Windows sucks, I'm in a position to know...
...how windows worked 10 years ago when XP was modern. Awesome.
Hahaha, the idea that anyone in Britain takes the Christmas number 1 seriously. Haven't you RTFA?
"The last big Christmas battle on a similar scale was between the Spice Girls' Goodbye and South Park character Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls in 1998."
You evidently know nothing of British politics. The Liberal Democrats are descended from the Liberals, who were where Labour are now at the start of the last century.
This just in: Agreeing with something is being told what to do. Organisation is the root of all evil.
Actually I'm agnostic. I was atheist, but the issue of morality is a pain in the arse and I don't *want* to live in a world where there is no right or wrong, just power and the will to enforce it. That's kind of shitty. If morality is law and law is a process for keeping society stable, morality is entirely functional. Morality/law will try to keep a person from committing a murder, but it doesn't judge them for it. The murderer would have guilt proven and a punishment assigned, but the punishment is just the price of going against society's will. Even more worryingly, a murderer who managed to hide it sufficiently well that the law did not notice would be morally sound.
It's interesting that you'd bring up the golden rule there - do unto others etc, especially as it has a very religious undertone and was mainly fleshed out by Kant, a Christian.
Pro-abortion arguments constantly allow the conclusion to slip into the argument. Why yes, mindless tissue is not a child. But what is a mind? When does the egg cease being mindless tissue and start being a mind? This is the question being asked, and for all you said gray areas aren't problematic, you didn't offer any backing up for that, you just stated it. The gray area *is* the problem.
I'm not even arguing against abortion as such, just in favour of coherent arguments. There is a gray area, yes, and saying that life begins at conception is arbitrary. But whatever limit you place will be arbitrary, how is a 'safe' limit any worse than a limit which accepts the possibility that you might be killing another sentient being?
Oh man, you wrote about 100 lines of argument from absurdity then cut it off at a ridiculously vague point. The problem with your argument is that it works all the way up until the child is about 3. Is killing children fine? Your argument justifies it. "has left the womb" is just as arbitrary as "has been fertilised".
In the bin behind somewhere which realised how useless they are. That's where I got my three SunRay 1's :P
Fun exercise: Tell me precisely when the fetus stops being a fetus and starts being a baby. When you've done that, start removing stones and tell me when it's no longer a pile.
>Secondly, a fetus, while it is 'human', is not 'a human'. There's an important difference.
As has already been commented, that's not necessarily true. The conclusion is in the premise, that's not a sound argument.
Tip: Unless you're religious, all morality is arbitrary - and even worse, mostly relative.
His analogy was retarded. There is no argument to be made here - if the situation were analogous, there wouldn't be a need for it because you could swap 'alien' for 'baby'. What is actually going on there is the tacit assumption that a developing baby doesn't count as a human. If that's your argument, you should say it. Don't pussy-foot around saying what you mean because that belies a lack of faith in your own reasoning.
As for your own argument, one of your initial assumptions is "If you dispose of pre-sentient tissue in your body, an early undeveloped human or alien fetus, that is a complete non-issue.". Many would disagree. It's not surprising you can construct a compelling argument for abortion when that's one of your starting points.
Hey, this makes total sense except for the fact that THE ONLY THING THE ANALOGY INTRODUCED WAS THAT THE BABY IS NO LONGER HUMAN. Well fucking done there champ, that's excellent.
So you're walking down the street when you see a HUGE ALIEN. You stab it to death hurriedly. And these self-righteous bastards want to try you for murder!
Equally, I don't think people should pay other people to sit around and have kids, or at the very least there should be diminishing amounts of support for the additional children and perhaps the suggestion of some kind of reversible sterilization.
When talking about child benefits, it's important to think of them in terms of the children benefiting, rather than the parents, lest what sounds reasonable from one angle is actually indisputably evil from the other. Here, you've said "I'm sorry, but as you are the third child from your parents you won't be going to college like your brothers. Sucks to be you, pick better parents next time."
You hit the nail squarely with that comment: Stallman values ethics more than he does profit, even his own, and the "entrepreneurs" of the world who have a reverse value system utterly despise him for it. Can we agree that Stallman is a talented man who, in some parallel dimension, could have made quite a lot of money for himself? He hasn't though, precisely because he doesn't value that extreme wealth.
To paraphrase Sartre, why would you attribute to him the capacity to do exactly what he did not do?
You know nothing of His work.
A zealot says what?
Frankly, I find htat hard to believe.
Letter overflow!
Running programs.
Or is the guy who wrote this completely and utterly nuts, in every way? I don't even need to cite this, just visit the labyrinth site and wait till your mind melts.
Police tell organiser to ask anyone else thinking of coming not to, organiser refuses, gets arrested for making a dangerous situation worse. Seems kinda reasonable once you get past the ridiculously OTT OP.