You could have a bunch of volunteers who simply go about their daily business, and have their blood regularly monitored in the same way. It won't give you much of an early-warning capability (by the time a volunteer gets a pathogen, many others will have it too), but it should cover the "different behaviours" issue.
There are simply somethings you cannot have without Religion, Morality being the biggest. True morality cannot exist without religion.
Actually, this is untrue. The Golden Rule in itself already goes a long way to establish a code of morality without implying a deity or cosmogony. A strong rationale for humans to form societies (out of the archetypal "state of nature") is mutual self-interest, e.g. "I don't like being killed, so I'll get together with a bunch of folks who also don't like getting killed, and we'll defend each other from bad guys who want to kill us," etc.
Besides, I don't see too many atheist/agnostic serial killers out there, so something's gotta be keeping them straight:-)
Here are somethings that cannot be proven: 1)Gays are born the way they are.
That is still the subject of ongoing research, but the recounted experiences of many gay men and women do seem to back that point. (Kids raised in completely "normal" circumstances who turn out to be gay, people in gay-unfriendly nations who turn out gay and don't revert despite extreme humiliation and violence, etc.)
...that reminds me of a little joke my uncle used to tell.
So there's these three naked women, chit-chatting with each other in a boudoir. One is an American, one is a European, and one is from the Middle East.
Some random guy gets lost, and stumbles into the boudoir, Mr. Bean-like. The three women notice him, scream, and...
...the American covers her breasts, ...the European covers her crotch, ...and the Mideastern woman covers her face.
Meaning that, humans instrinsically have those rights, and the governments over them should be unable to constrain them. Do you believe otherwise? Can the case be made otherwise?
I don't believe there is such a thing as an "intrinsic" human right. However, there are some principles that we know are essential to a stable society (e.g. no unregulated killing), and some that are conducive to a culturally/socially healthy society (freedom of religion/speech/press). We've progressed far enough in our history to know that these freedoms are important, and that when they are taken away, it is all too often for the benefit of the rulers over the ruled. We are confident enough of these principles to call them "universal," to write them down as important documents, to berate regimes that flout them. And, by and large, when some country/society has said, "You don't understand us, we don't need/want your human rights," it has been the word of someone not suffering the violation of those rights (e.g. men vs. women in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere).
Of course, a big part of it is also that societies that follow the general notion of human rights have reaped many economic benefits as an indirect result (e.g. free speech -> intellectuals -> technology), and in turn, strong militaries. North Korea, Zimbabwe et al.... they're not about to gain new territory anytime soon. (This would be the "Guns, Germs and Steel" explanation of why human rights are important:-)
Yep. And if open mail relays are abused too often, then the sysadmins can just enable access control lists on the servers, neatly solving the problem.
:-)
(In other words: Yes, there are some ways to work around a missing top-level DNS domain, but unless Everyone Cooperates Perfectly(tm), you're still gonna have MAAAAAAAASIVE repercussions in the affected country...)
The Europeans don't complain about Iran/NK because they expect the worst from those nations, and there's not much more the European governments can do about it than they already are. In other words, w.r.t. those nations, the whole point is moot.
I think the comparison is apt, though of course it's a limited one. The U.S. is nowhere near being a pariah state like Iran/NK/Zimbabwe/etc. But I do see some similarities that do not befit its image as a leader among nations.
In fact, the whole uproar made by people of your disposition is a constant reminder to anyone sane that America is on the right path, or at least the least wrong path, for it to excite the passions of such terrible people. Having the whole world disagree with you is a good thing, when the "whole world" looks like Europe or the UN.
I guess Iran and North Korea are on the right track after all, then....
So the DMCA's interoperability exception isn't a statutory right. You're free to sign it away in the terms of a contract.
Of course, then, every single software maker adds to their EULA boilerplate that "You disclaim any and all right to reverse-engineer the Product for interoperability purposes under the DMCA...."
If you drop a book, and it flies upward, you just disproved gravity. How do you disprove evolution? What data would disprove it? A theory must be disprovable, or what are you supposed to be testing for?
An instance of spontaneous generation (abiogenesis) would be a good start. Find some rotten meat that turns into flies (or bacteria), and you'll have the ear of a few biologists.
That means let the majority religious belief system define it, as long as it doesn't hurt the minority.
Careful there. "Congress shall make no law...."
Can't civil unions give you what you want?
If federal/state laws were rewritten as you say, granting the same rights to married as well as civilly-united couples, then that would probably be good enough for most people---the "marriage" vs. "civil union" semantic would be just a legalism. (Same-sex couples would still call themselves "married," and in time, most people would as well.)
I don't think, however, that anyone considers a rewrite of this scale to be viable. Especially at the federal government level.
Don't try that bullshit. Do NOT try to equate the struggle for racial equality with the battle over equality of sexual orientation. It belittles us both for you to try.
No one is saying that they're the same thing. Both struggles have different scopes, histories, etc. The women's movement for suffrage, equal pay and the like is a third example, different from the former two.
That is not to say, however, that one cannot draw parallels between these different social movements. One can take issue with the specifics of a particular comparison (e.g. "you can't change your skin color, but you sure can change your sexual orientation!"), but calling all comparisons off-limits strikes me more as willful ignorance to the lessons of those past struggles.
Sure, Richard Simmons may not be MLK, but what does Matthew Shephard's death bring to mind?
Second, I really don't get it why this whole issue of "rights" (read: undue privileges) for people with messed up sexual drive is considered a serious matter worth discussing and legislating about in the US. Why should it be a matter worth commenting on Slashdot? Can someone explain it in logical terms why this is important to you, preferably without name-calling and stuff like that?
Because a lot of people hold negative attitudes toward gay/lesbian people---attitudes that more and more folks today are finding to have little social merit[1]---that significantly impair the latter's ability to get jobs, find housing, and attain other important "pursuit of happiness"-type things. Same basic reason that legislation got passed in the 1950s/60s to ban discrimination on the basis of race.
Are the rights under discussion "undue privileges?" Well, employers cannot refuse to hire an employee because s/he is Jewish. Is that an undue privilege granted to Jews?
[1] Cf. negative attitudes toward sex offenders et al.
The ISP needs to force the user to at minimum to install a software firewall.
Simpler than that. Just give customers a firewall appliance with their modem, and warnings of the doom that will befall them if they don't hook it up between their modem and PC....
"testing" gets updates only after they've been in "unstable" for some time, without showstopper bugs. True, unstable gets fixes first, but testing is less likely to break in the first place. (And if something does break badly in testing, the fix can be hurried through. This happened a year or two ago, when a bug in testing's X11 startup scripts wouldn't let the window system run. A lot of folks noticed:-)
I'd say, go for Sarge. The kind of bugs you're worried about turn up rarely in practice.
If you read the article you would know that the company disputes that copyright has expired, so the song has not been liberated and other "infringers" could still be sued. This hasn't prevented anything in the future.
Why would a case against a future infringer turn out any differently from this one?
Arguably, SatAM was the most serious and well done (Character wise) and had a continual plot.
Amen. StH/SatAM really stood out as a grittier, more mature series than typical Saturday morning fare. That, the high-tech/sci-fi-ish setting, and the fact that all the good guys were furries (*grin*) made it my personal all-time favorite TV show. Still waiting for that DVD box set some day....
Sonic X is doing pretty good, but we'll have to wait and see how it finishes out.
I picked up a pirate DVD of that one, first three episodes. The whole Sonic/real world crossover idea is cute. I liked the fact that they took two of the Sonic-world characters to a military facility for "study," but the whole "police department that uses F1 racers to track down high-speed moving violations" schtick stretched credibility just a wee bit too far for me ^_^
Ah, yes. True. I was still thinking of the grandparent's scenario of providing Webmail to himself and a few friends, where transferring the fingerprint by Post-It note is feasible:-)
That's why you check the fingerprint on the certificate. A third party can spoof DNS and run a site that looks identical to your own, but unless they have an underground bunker full of Crays somewhere, their site cert's not gonna have the same fingerprint:-)
Have to agree with you on XFT's bad karma. I use Mozilla and (once upon a time) Firefox 0.8 with the font.FreeType2.enable option, which yields muchmuchmuch nicer-looking fonts. As of Firefox 0.9, however, the direct-FreeType support seems to have been dropped in favor of XFT alone:-(
I've been trying to compile Firefox from source with --enable-freetype and --disable-xft, but ye gods is it a pain to sort through the build problems that come up....
Slashdot Mirror
You could have a bunch of volunteers who simply go about their daily business, and have their blood regularly monitored in the same way. It won't give you much of an early-warning capability (by the time a volunteer gets a pathogen, many others will have it too), but it should cover the "different behaviours" issue.
However, the belief that random processes and mutations can create new information out of nowhere, breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Repeat after me: The Earth is not a closed system.
"Each day more solar energy falls to the Earth than the total amount of energy the planet's 6.1 billion inhabitants would consume in 27 years."
Whatever happens here on Earth, entropy always has the last laugh. Evolution and thermodynamics do not conflict.
There are simply somethings you cannot have without Religion, Morality being the biggest. True morality cannot exist without religion.
:-)
Actually, this is untrue. The Golden Rule in itself already goes a long way to establish a code of morality without implying a deity or cosmogony. A strong rationale for humans to form societies (out of the archetypal "state of nature") is mutual self-interest, e.g. "I don't like being killed, so I'll get together with a bunch of folks who also don't like getting killed, and we'll defend each other from bad guys who want to kill us," etc.
Besides, I don't see too many atheist/agnostic serial killers out there, so something's gotta be keeping them straight
Here are somethings that cannot be proven:
1)Gays are born the way they are.
That is still the subject of ongoing research, but the recounted experiences of many gay men and women do seem to back that point. (Kids raised in completely "normal" circumstances who turn out to be gay, people in gay-unfriendly nations who turn out gay and don't revert despite extreme humiliation and violence, etc.)
...that reminds me of a little joke my uncle used to tell.
...the American covers her breasts,
...the European covers her crotch,
...and the Mideastern woman covers her face.
:-)
So there's these three naked women, chit-chatting with each other in a boudoir. One is an American, one is a European, and one is from the Middle East.
Some random guy gets lost, and stumbles into the boudoir, Mr. Bean-like. The three women notice him, scream, and...
(Mind you, this was one of his tamer ones...
Meaning that, humans instrinsically have those rights, and the governments over them should be unable to constrain them. Do you believe otherwise? Can the case be made otherwise?
... they're not about to gain new territory anytime soon. (This would be the "Guns, Germs and Steel" explanation of why human rights are important :-)
I don't believe there is such a thing as an "intrinsic" human right. However, there are some principles that we know are essential to a stable society (e.g. no unregulated killing), and some that are conducive to a culturally/socially healthy society (freedom of religion/speech/press). We've progressed far enough in our history to know that these freedoms are important, and that when they are taken away, it is all too often for the benefit of the rulers over the ruled. We are confident enough of these principles to call them "universal," to write them down as important documents, to berate regimes that flout them. And, by and large, when some country/society has said, "You don't understand us, we don't need/want your human rights," it has been the word of someone not suffering the violation of those rights (e.g. men vs. women in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere).
Of course, a big part of it is also that societies that follow the general notion of human rights have reaped many economic benefits as an indirect result (e.g. free speech -> intellectuals -> technology), and in turn, strong militaries. North Korea, Zimbabwe et al.
Yep. And if open mail relays are abused too often, then the sysadmins can just enable access control lists on the servers, neatly solving the problem.
:-)
(In other words: Yes, there are some ways to work around a missing top-level DNS domain, but unless Everyone Cooperates Perfectly(tm), you're still gonna have MAAAAAAAASIVE repercussions in the affected country...)
The Europeans don't complain about Iran/NK because they expect the worst from those nations, and there's not much more the European governments can do about it than they already are. In other words, w.r.t. those nations, the whole point is moot.
I think the comparison is apt, though of course it's a limited one. The U.S. is nowhere near being a pariah state like Iran/NK/Zimbabwe/etc. But I do see some similarities that do not befit its image as a leader among nations.
In fact, the whole uproar made by people of your disposition is a constant reminder to anyone sane that America is on the right path, or at least the least wrong path, for it to excite the passions of such terrible people. Having the whole world disagree with you is a good thing, when the "whole world" looks like Europe or the UN.
I guess Iran and North Korea are on the right track after all, then....
(yeah, I have a sick mind ... but many of you out there think the same way)
Too bad the lot of you aren't in New Orleans right now. I'm sure you'd be having the time of your lives.
So the DMCA's interoperability exception isn't a statutory right. You're free to sign it away in the terms of a contract.
Of course, then, every single software maker adds to their EULA boilerplate that "You disclaim any and all right to reverse-engineer the Product for interoperability purposes under the DMCA...."
If you drop a book, and it flies upward, you just disproved gravity. How do you disprove evolution? What data would disprove it? A theory must be disprovable, or what are you supposed to be testing for?
An instance of spontaneous generation (abiogenesis) would be a good start. Find some rotten meat that turns into flies (or bacteria), and you'll have the ear of a few biologists.
Replace "race" with "religion."
Also, if homosexuality is not an inborn trait, then gays must be the most masochistic fellows ever to walk the earth.
How's that old Heinlein quote go? "It takes about twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative, without changing a single belief?"
:-)
(Maybe more than twenty years in this case, but you get the idea...
Matt Shephard was killed when someone tried to rip him off.
Assuming that Mr. McKinney and Mr. Henderson were telling the truth.
The fact that the "gay panic" defense has ever been used at all (and not always unsuccessfully) is quite instructive as well....
That means let the majority religious belief system define it, as long as it doesn't hurt the minority.
Careful there. "Congress shall make no law...."
Can't civil unions give you what you want?
If federal/state laws were rewritten as you say, granting the same rights to married as well as civilly-united couples, then that would probably be good enough for most people---the "marriage" vs. "civil union" semantic would be just a legalism. (Same-sex couples would still call themselves "married," and in time, most people would as well.)
I don't think, however, that anyone considers a rewrite of this scale to be viable. Especially at the federal government level.
Don't try that bullshit. Do NOT try to equate the struggle for racial equality with the battle over equality of sexual orientation. It belittles us both for you to try.
No one is saying that they're the same thing. Both struggles have different scopes, histories, etc. The women's movement for suffrage, equal pay and the like is a third example, different from the former two.
That is not to say, however, that one cannot draw parallels between these different social movements. One can take issue with the specifics of a particular comparison (e.g. "you can't change your skin color, but you sure can change your sexual orientation!"), but calling all comparisons off-limits strikes me more as willful ignorance to the lessons of those past struggles.
Sure, Richard Simmons may not be MLK, but what does Matthew Shephard's death bring to mind?
Second, I really don't get it why this whole issue of "rights" (read: undue privileges) for people with messed up sexual drive is considered a serious matter worth discussing and legislating about in the US. Why should it be a matter worth commenting on Slashdot? Can someone explain it in logical terms why this is important to you, preferably without name-calling and stuff like that?
Because a lot of people hold negative attitudes toward gay/lesbian people---attitudes that more and more folks today are finding to have little social merit[1]---that significantly impair the latter's ability to get jobs, find housing, and attain other important "pursuit of happiness"-type things. Same basic reason that legislation got passed in the 1950s/60s to ban discrimination on the basis of race.
Are the rights under discussion "undue privileges?" Well, employers cannot refuse to hire an employee because s/he is Jewish. Is that an undue privilege granted to Jews?
[1] Cf. negative attitudes toward sex offenders et al.
The ISP needs to force the user to at minimum to install a software firewall.
Simpler than that. Just give customers a firewall appliance with their modem, and warnings of the doom that will befall them if they don't hook it up between their modem and PC....
"testing" gets updates only after they've been in "unstable" for some time, without showstopper bugs. True, unstable gets fixes first, but testing is less likely to break in the first place. (And if something does break badly in testing, the fix can be hurried through. This happened a year or two ago, when a bug in testing's X11 startup scripts wouldn't let the window system run. A lot of folks noticed :-)
I'd say, go for Sarge. The kind of bugs you're worried about turn up rarely in practice.
Privoxy
Works great with Squid. Hasn't been maintained in a while, however.
If you read the article you would know that the company disputes that copyright has expired, so the song has not been liberated and other "infringers" could still be sued. This hasn't prevented anything in the future.
Why would a case against a future infringer turn out any differently from this one?
Arguably, SatAM was the most serious and well done (Character wise) and had a continual plot.
Amen. StH/SatAM really stood out as a grittier, more mature series than typical Saturday morning fare. That, the high-tech/sci-fi-ish setting, and the fact that all the good guys were furries (*grin*) made it my personal all-time favorite TV show. Still waiting for that DVD box set some day....
Sonic X is doing pretty good, but we'll have to wait and see how it finishes out.
I picked up a pirate DVD of that one, first three episodes. The whole Sonic/real world crossover idea is cute. I liked the fact that they took two of the Sonic-world characters to a military facility for "study," but the whole "police department that uses F1 racers to track down high-speed moving violations" schtick stretched credibility just a wee bit too far for me ^_^
Ah, yes. True. I was still thinking of the grandparent's scenario of providing Webmail to himself and a few friends, where transferring the fingerprint by Post-It note is feasible :-)
That's why you check the fingerprint on the certificate. A third party can spoof DNS and run a site that looks identical to your own, but unless they have an underground bunker full of Crays somewhere, their site cert's not gonna have the same fingerprint :-)
Have to agree with you on XFT's bad karma. I use Mozilla and (once upon a time) Firefox 0.8 with the font.FreeType2.enable option, which yields muchmuchmuch nicer-looking fonts. As of Firefox 0.9, however, the direct-FreeType support seems to have been dropped in favor of XFT alone :-(
I've been trying to compile Firefox from source with --enable-freetype and --disable-xft, but ye gods is it a pain to sort through the build problems that come up....