So at least for Austria and Germany, there are only a few small religious groups which are "legitimate". Most larger churches (e.g. catholics, lutherans, reformed churches) have a contract with the government which then collects the church membership fee for them with the normal taxes. You can only stop your automatic church payments by officially declaring you are no longer member of this church.
Spraying something on a wall is also forbidden, but I guess only in the U.S. you get three years probation for "Kilroy was here" and an undisclosed time frame for a ban from all colors and pens. Somehow this fits the image of "We do it on the Internet, and suddenly everything is one thousand times that big!"
This was just some silly vandalism, and handing a sentence that big makes it just completely out of proportion. Samy is suddenly an (anti-)hero for basically nothing important.
The same can be said about the terrorism panic. It's still more likely to choke on a fishbone and die than to be hit by a terroristic attack. For Germany [pop. 80 mio] there are about 700 reported dead each year because of choking on a fishbone. I wonder if the number of all Germans ever dying during a terroristic attack since 1947 has ever reached 700. And the perception still gets it wrong if two risks are very similar: Think about the craze because of the H5N1 bird flu. Worldwide we have now ~200 people who died because of H5N1. Each year the numbers of people dying on whatever flu is currently going around is in the millions. For Germany the estimations are between 10,000 and 20,000.
This is a clever move by them both from the legal side and the PR it generates. There is nothing wrong with being clever and funny at the same time (even though the/. moderation system seems to think otherwise).
That's not the problem. But if you have a CPU intensive, but non-threaded program in your 128-processor-computer, then one processer runs at 100% load for your program, another one maybe at 28% to keep the I/O running, and 126 processors are idle. Thus your computer runs at 128%/128 = 1% of its capacity, even though the problem you are trying to solve on it is solely CPU limited.
The main difference between positivists and Sir Karl Popper is, that K. Popper doesn't allow inductive conclusions to be correct by itself. That means: Sir Karl Popper doesn't believe in an inductive conclusion model that by carefully following its rules yields necessarily correct results. For deductive logic he believes that to be the case. This doesn't rule out that inductive conclusion could come up with a sufficiently correct theory, but the theory has to be tested without going back to the induction it came from.
Thus we get to the falsification theory. For a theory to be false it is sufficient to find a single item/experiment/fact that doesn't adhere to the theory. This is a deductive conclusion. For a theory to be right we would have to check all items that the theory could describe. For most physical phenomenons they are just to many, because we would not only have to check the phenomenons that exist, but also those that could exist. (e.g. for a theory about the human brain we would not only check all living humans, but all theoretically possible brains, whose number is much higher than the number of elementary particles in the universe).
According to the first google result for "neurons human brain" I got, a human brain has about 100 billion (10^11) neurons. Lets say each neuron can have a synapse (a nervous connection) to each of up to 10 neighbouring neurons. If each human brain would have exactly the same layout resp. to the neurons, we would still have to take a subset of 10 times 100 billion synapses to make an individual brain. So how many individual brains do we get? Because every potential synapse might exist (1) or not (0), we get {0,1} to the power of 10*100 billion, or 2 ^ 1 trillion different potential human brains. This is roughly 10 to the power of 300 billion, that means we need 10 to the power of 3 billion universes just to enumerate(*) all potential human brains.
Even if we have a very primitive animal with only 30 neurons, we get 300 different synapses, 2^300 different brains and we would still need the whole universe with 10^100 elementary particles to enumerate that.
(*) enumerate: In this case map each brain layout to an elementary particle.
Just to elaborate a little: In most parts of the world a liberal is considered someone who likes libertas, the latin word for freedom. The Liberal Democrats of Japan are pretty different from anything a U.S. conservative would label 'liberal'. The austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Liberal Party of Austria) even is considered pretty close to being a Nazi party by some. The more nice description is 'rightwing conservative'.
For some reason liberal in most parts of the world means, according to the roots of the word, a free-market, free-society oriented person. That the U.S. hat to invent the word libertarian for that means that the label liberal itself is just a label, used without thinking about its real meaning.
No, both mean, if used by one side that considers itself definitely "not Nazi" or "not Liberal", the same: I don't bother with your arguments, I just label you as not confirming with me and thus being a moron.
At least conservatives explain why they think you're wrong. Liberals spit and call you a Nazi. And there was me thinking that calling you a liberal was a conservative's way of spitting at you and calling you a nazi. Silly me!
We know Cthulhu turns into a mist (Call of Cthulhu), we know he can't pass the elder sign and we know that the Chinese can etch entire names onto grains of rice. Not only the Chinese can do that. In the Green Vault (the ducal treasury) in Dresden, there is a cherry pit on display with more than 180 faces (some sources say 185, others 186) engraved.
I actually hate the idea that you have to be a candidate in the district to demand recount. I think everyone with the right to vote has also the right to count or at least to watch the counting. Otherwise you end up with cases like Dachau (Germany), where the mayor and the election official were moving ballot boxes between districts to do their own private gerrymandering. Luckily not only the voting was fair, the counting was also public, and enough people noticed the changed counts when the official results were published.
Public counting actually makes a difference, and everything that shortcuts public counting is actually bad.
Electronic voting steals you half of your voting rights: The right to watch the counting. As someone born and raised in the former Eastern Block I know this is important. We had the right to mark a sheet of paper with a pen and put it in a box. But the outcome was predetermined anyway. Most later convictions for voting fraud in East Germany were only possible, because people watched the counting in enough voting places in 1989 to compare their results with the officially stated.
So don't let you take the right to watch the counting!
I don't think it's an either or situation, but if we're getting a spike that is outside the bounds of models based primarily on increased greenhouse gas composition in the atmosphere, which indisputably contribute to warming, then we might want to factor in increased solar activity into our models to more accurately predict the climate trends into the next century. The models about melting ice weren't taking in consideration the process of tidewater glaciers(*), and if they did, they didn't expect so many islands in place where they counted on peninsulas, thus increasing the area for tidewater glaciers.
It's not the influence of greenhouse gases that was not correctly accounted for, it was a not completely understood process of the actual melting of the ice together with an incorrect mapping of the actual coastline, that caused the errors.
(*) Tidewater glaciers, as explained in TFA, are glaciers, that reach into coastal waters, thus get rocked by the tides, and thus are "birthing" huge chunks of ice which then get loose and drift into the open (and warmer) ocean.
That's in fact the story behind it. She said that someone contacted her while she was online and asked for the pictures. And that he never contacted her again after she sent them.
But I remember that I walked home from school when I was about 13 years old and a small crowd of four to five girls was walking behind me and, calling me, flashing, and demanding to have sex with them. They were between 9 and 12 years old. I knew what classes they were in, so the age was easily to determine. (No, I didn't turn to them.) So I guess for girls that age to have a rudimentary understanding of sexuality is quite normal. I myself had at age 12 a pretty good vocabulary of sexual terms, I knew the position of the G-spot, and I was able to tell the difference between a cunnilingus and anal perforation, though only theoretically.
So I can't rule out that a person of age 11 or 12 suddenly gets the idea of taking nude picture of herself.
There is a second thing to that. With the inability of the device to spread your very own content it is no longer a device for you to promote your own content. So not only the usage and the distribution of content gets controlled, also the creation of new content gets controlled, because the only way to get out content with mandatory DRM is to sign up with a DRM provider (and if you can't pay the sign up fee in cash, you have to sign a contract surrendering rights for your own creation).
That's something I really don't get. It contradicts itself.
Q: Why do we protect children from sexual predators? A: Because children are deemed unable to make a conscious and consenting sexual decision.
Q: If anything sexual a child decides to do or not to do is unconscious or nonconsenting, how can it ever commit a sexual crime? A: Because we say if it does it anyway, it must be a criminal.
(We have currently a case in Germany where an at the time probably 11 year old girl took sexual photographs of itself and sent them to someone per email. In the U.S. probably the girl now would face charges for producing and distributing child porn).
If you don't have special language courses and just pick it up by daily usage, 12 months is a realistic time frame. And the first steps are very fast indeed. When I was in Brazil for three weeks I picked up enough Portugese to understand the basics of a news paper article, could follow some of the TV shows and in the end was able to tell a joke in Portugese. On the other hand I was visiting relatives who don't speak anything but Portugese.
And no, I am not the language talent in our family. My brother speaks seven languages (including some of the more obscure like Middle Age Latin and Irish).
Hm... at least the discussion in Germany around 2002 and 2003 was different. I remember Ludger Vollmer (Green Party, at that time reigning together with the Social Democrats) arguing in the Bundestag against a war because "there is no planning ahead, and there will be a human catastrophe following because of fleeing people and the starting ethnic cleansing". And the idea that the war in Iraq was giving islamic fundamentalist new arguments for their deeds was surely floating around. A lot of people also feared that the South might not be as easily greet the U.S. troups as liberators because of the 1992 insurgency that was left to be crushed by Saddam. And indeed the small southern port town of Umm Qasr took more than a week to capture, while Bagdad fell within three days.
I remember telling my sister-in-law at Christmas 2002 that I expected the U.S. troups to make fast headway through Iraq, then boasting to everyone about it, thinking that would be it, and finally get dragged in an ongoing partisan war where they would lose control. Somehow being in Old Europe and thus being a spectator instead of an actor helped somewhat to keep overview.
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So at least for Austria and Germany, there are only a few small religious groups which are "legitimate". Most larger churches (e.g. catholics, lutherans, reformed churches) have a contract with the government which then collects the church membership fee for them with the normal taxes. You can only stop your automatic church payments by officially declaring you are no longer member of this church.
Curiously the greek word "xenophon" means "strange sound" or "foreign sound" :) So Xenophon himself might not have been a native greek.
Spraying something on a wall is also forbidden, but I guess only in the U.S. you get three years probation for "Kilroy was here" and an undisclosed time frame for a ban from all colors and pens. Somehow this fits the image of "We do it on the Internet, and suddenly everything is one thousand times that big!"
This was just some silly vandalism, and handing a sentence that big makes it just completely out of proportion. Samy is suddenly an (anti-)hero for basically nothing important.
The same can be said about the terrorism panic. It's still more likely to choke on a fishbone and die than to be hit by a terroristic attack. For Germany [pop. 80 mio] there are about 700 reported dead each year because of choking on a fishbone. I wonder if the number of all Germans ever dying during a terroristic attack since 1947 has ever reached 700.
And the perception still gets it wrong if two risks are very similar: Think about the craze because of the H5N1 bird flu. Worldwide we have now ~200 people who died because of H5N1. Each year the numbers of people dying on whatever flu is currently going around is in the millions. For Germany the estimations are between 10,000 and 20,000.
I got mine at age five. So what? :)
That's not the problem. But if you have a CPU intensive, but non-threaded program in your 128-processor-computer, then one processer runs at 100% load for your program, another one maybe at 28% to keep the I/O running, and 126 processors are idle. Thus your computer runs at 128%/128 = 1% of its capacity, even though the problem you are trying to solve on it is solely CPU limited.
There is still Atto-AnyTX. :)
The main difference between positivists and Sir Karl Popper is, that K. Popper doesn't allow inductive conclusions to be correct by itself. That means: Sir Karl Popper doesn't believe in an inductive conclusion model that by carefully following its rules yields necessarily correct results. For deductive logic he believes that to be the case. This doesn't rule out that inductive conclusion could come up with a sufficiently correct theory, but the theory has to be tested without going back to the induction it came from.
Thus we get to the falsification theory. For a theory to be false it is sufficient to find a single item/experiment/fact that doesn't adhere to the theory. This is a deductive conclusion. For a theory to be right we would have to check all items that the theory could describe. For most physical phenomenons they are just to many, because we would not only have to check the phenomenons that exist, but also those that could exist. (e.g. for a theory about the human brain we would not only check all living humans, but all theoretically possible brains, whose number is much higher than the number of elementary particles in the universe).
Ok... I'll bite. :)
According to the first google result for "neurons human brain" I got, a human brain has about 100 billion (10^11) neurons. Lets say each neuron can have a synapse (a nervous connection) to each of up to 10 neighbouring neurons. If each human brain would have exactly the same layout resp. to the neurons, we would still have to take a subset of 10 times 100 billion synapses to make an individual brain. So how many individual brains do we get? Because every potential synapse might exist (1) or not (0), we get {0,1} to the power of 10*100 billion, or 2 ^ 1 trillion different potential human brains. This is roughly 10 to the power of 300 billion, that means we need 10 to the power of 3 billion universes just to enumerate(*) all potential human brains.
Even if we have a very primitive animal with only 30 neurons, we get 300 different synapses, 2^300 different brains and we would still need the whole universe with 10^100 elementary particles to enumerate that.
(*) enumerate: In this case map each brain layout to an elementary particle.
Just to elaborate a little: In most parts of the world a liberal is considered someone who likes libertas, the latin word for freedom. The Liberal Democrats of Japan are pretty different from anything a U.S. conservative would label 'liberal'. The austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Liberal Party of Austria) even is considered pretty close to being a Nazi party by some. The more nice description is 'rightwing conservative'.
For some reason liberal in most parts of the world means, according to the roots of the word, a free-market, free-society oriented person. That the U.S. hat to invent the word libertarian for that means that the label liberal itself is just a label, used without thinking about its real meaning.
No, both mean, if used by one side that considers itself definitely "not Nazi" or "not Liberal", the same: I don't bother with your arguments, I just label you as not confirming with me and thus being a moron.
Ok... how many more proofs do we have, that the power set of any set always has a higher cardinal number?
That's like the famous quote from the Beggar's Opera:
"What is breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?"
I actually hate the idea that you have to be a candidate in the district to demand recount. I think everyone with the right to vote has also the right to count or at least to watch the counting. Otherwise you end up with cases like Dachau (Germany), where the mayor and the election official were moving ballot boxes between districts to do their own private gerrymandering. Luckily not only the voting was fair, the counting was also public, and enough people noticed the changed counts when the official results were published.
Public counting actually makes a difference, and everything that shortcuts public counting is actually bad.
Electronic voting steals you half of your voting rights: The right to watch the counting. As someone born and raised in the former Eastern Block I know this is important. We had the right to mark a sheet of paper with a pen and put it in a box. But the outcome was predetermined anyway. Most later convictions for voting fraud in East Germany were only possible, because people watched the counting in enough voting places in 1989 to compare their results with the officially stated.
So don't let you take the right to watch the counting!
It's not the influence of greenhouse gases that was not correctly accounted for, it was a not completely understood process of the actual melting of the ice together with an incorrect mapping of the actual coastline, that caused the errors.
(*) Tidewater glaciers, as explained in TFA, are glaciers, that reach into coastal waters, thus get rocked by the tides, and thus are "birthing" huge chunks of ice which then get loose and drift into the open (and warmer) ocean.
That's in fact the story behind it. She said that someone contacted her while she was online and asked for the pictures. And that he never contacted her again after she sent them.
But I remember that I walked home from school when I was about 13 years old and a small crowd of four to five girls was walking behind me and, calling me, flashing, and demanding to have sex with them. They were between 9 and 12 years old. I knew what classes they were in, so the age was easily to determine. (No, I didn't turn to them.) So I guess for girls that age to have a rudimentary understanding of sexuality is quite normal. I myself had at age 12 a pretty good vocabulary of sexual terms, I knew the position of the G-spot, and I was able to tell the difference between a cunnilingus and anal perforation, though only theoretically.
So I can't rule out that a person of age 11 or 12 suddenly gets the idea of taking nude picture of herself.
There is a second thing to that. With the inability of the device to spread your very own content it is no longer a device for you to promote your own content. So not only the usage and the distribution of content gets controlled, also the creation of new content gets controlled, because the only way to get out content with mandatory DRM is to sign up with a DRM provider (and if you can't pay the sign up fee in cash, you have to sign a contract surrendering rights for your own creation).
That's something I really don't get. It contradicts itself.
Q: Why do we protect children from sexual predators?
A: Because children are deemed unable to make a conscious and consenting sexual decision.
Q: If anything sexual a child decides to do or not to do is unconscious or nonconsenting, how can it ever commit a sexual crime?
A: Because we say if it does it anyway, it must be a criminal.
(We have currently a case in Germany where an at the time probably 11 year old girl took sexual photographs of itself and sent them to someone per email. In the U.S. probably the girl now would face charges for producing and distributing child porn).
If you don't have special language courses and just pick it up by daily usage, 12 months is a realistic time frame. And the first steps are very fast indeed. When I was in Brazil for three weeks I picked up enough Portugese to understand the basics of a news paper article, could follow some of the TV shows and in the end was able to tell a joke in Portugese. On the other hand I was visiting relatives who don't speak anything but Portugese.
And no, I am not the language talent in our family. My brother speaks seven languages (including some of the more obscure like Middle Age Latin and Irish).
As long as you (or your company) has a product for sale incorporating said patent, you can not be forced to license it.
Hm... at least the discussion in Germany around 2002 and 2003 was different. I remember Ludger Vollmer (Green Party, at that time reigning together with the Social Democrats) arguing in the Bundestag against a war because "there is no planning ahead, and there will be a human catastrophe following because of fleeing people and the starting ethnic cleansing". And the idea that the war in Iraq was giving islamic fundamentalist new arguments for their deeds was surely floating around. A lot of people also feared that the South might not be as easily greet the U.S. troups as liberators because of the 1992 insurgency that was left to be crushed by Saddam. And indeed the small southern port town of Umm Qasr took more than a week to capture, while Bagdad fell within three days.
I remember telling my sister-in-law at Christmas 2002 that I expected the U.S. troups to make fast headway through Iraq, then boasting to everyone about it, thinking that would be it, and finally get dragged in an ongoing partisan war where they would lose control. Somehow being in Old Europe and thus being a spectator instead of an actor helped somewhat to keep overview.