So rather than restricting the rights of the government to take your money and spend it on others, you want to restrict the rights of the individual to do with their bodies as they see fit?
I don't think someone selling marijuana should enjoy the same limited rights as a murderer--yet it happens all the time.
Rather than finding new and creative ways to maintain the status quo of crime punishment in America, I think money should be spent on creating equity in the criminal justice system and finding new, less expensive ways to punish prisoners.
An example is a program in (at least) California which permits sex offenders to be released from prison early in exchange for their testicles. I believe the program applies only to non-violet sex offenders. It is entirely voluntary and strict measures are taken to ensure that the removal of the balls will have the desired effect. I don't immediately see any problem with this method of punishment -- more care is given to being sure of the efficacy of the program than is given in being sure prison is effective at reducing recidivism. Further, this is specifically targeting one of the major enablers of sexual activity without mucking about in an offender's brain or punishing someone for having a brain that has developed a certain way. Believers in the sanctity of the person win, believers in the safety of the populace win, the offender loses, and the punishment is served. Keep in mind those are arguable points, but it's what I believe.
I'm surprised more attention hasn't been paid to it, especially in light of the (literally) Draconian punishments for sexual assault in Colorado. Attaching devices to the genitals of prisoners to observe their reactions to pornography that is considered violent towards women (yet is still sold on the streets and available for anyone to download to see female actors agreeing to act in exchange for payment) is not an appropriate method for determining whether someone will offend again. Sex is the most natural thing people can do, and punishing someone for having irrepressible, instinctual sexual thoughts should be a crime, not the other way around.
I believe the shortcomings of the system that should be addressed are at the foundation of the system. Problems like ballooning prisoner populations are symptoms of a failing system.
Also a lot more people died in the Bhopal Gas leak in India from a fertilizer factory than from Chernobyl but people are shit scared of Nuclear plants.
That's because when nuclear plants have accidents they don't just kill in the initial explosion. They can kill every day for hundreds of years.
It's estimated that it will be six hundred years before it is safe for people to live in some areas around Chernobyl. For a sense of scale, six hundred years ago people didn't know there were continents on this side of the Atlantic. People are scared of nuclear power for a reason, and it's their right to be.
Newspapers neither cost more nor take longer to read the more images they contain.
I imagine that the ~4 pages of articles would take a bit less time to read if they weren't scattered among ~10 pages of advertisements.
You've got me on the cost, though; there are people for whom significant cost is incurred per kilobyte, but those people probably aren't going to opt-in for newsletters whose content will vary in length without being conscious of the possibility that it'll be in HTML by default.
For those occasions when they do get an inappropriately large message, failure to opt-out or change the delivery preference is entirely on them.
Going to a movie theatre doesn't include a hidden bug at the start of the movie that confirms to some marketing droid that I'm a real person and they should feel free to spam my future visits with an extra 30 minutes of commercials before the movie starts.
You're right. That is an inevitable problem with HTML email. It's why many email programs are now blocking external images by default. Even gmail and hotmail are doing this.
And speaking as a former modem user who hasn't had broadband for that long, I promise you Slashdot is perfectly usable and just as informative/interesting with images disabled.
You missed the point; you could substitute slashdot for any other site in the gopher reference and it would still be true that for some information it is better to use styles and images than plaintext. Sometimes plaintext is better than the bells and whistles. I was refuting a specific false claim.
The grandparent was right on the money. E-mail is a text medium.
So is HTTP.
If you can't tell me something through that medium, then chances are I don't want your e-mail. In fact, and this is a very good reason that businesses should not send HTML e-mails without an explicit request, your e-mail will get a huge negative score on my Bayesian anti-spam filter just for having it. That applies whether it's alone or combined with a separate text-only version, though if the text-only version matches the HTML content closely the penalty isn't so great. Moreover, even if it gets through the filter, it'll get rendered as plain text anyway, and therefore probably look worse than it would have done if you'd just sent me that in the first place. It's not exactly likely to improve your sales/feedback level/customer satisfaction/whatever on either count...
So your spam filter based on your training filters your email to your preference? You've got to be kidding.
The point is HTML email isn't going anywhere. Email is a very flexible system and things like HTML and attachments are exploitations of it. If the manner in which people craft their email is not acceptable to someone, then it's up to them to do something about it.
If your message cannot be conveyed in plain text, then it's probably time to rethink the whole newsletter approach.
That must be why newspapers have a single size and type font without images, why people go to movie theaters to read screenplays, and why we're all reading gopher://slashdot.org.
The problem is that this opens the door to a host of other bullshit ideas. If we give credence to ideas that cannot be proven and outright defy proof then we will slowly slide into giving other such ideas weight.
Would creationists object to the teaching of reincarnation in schools? On what grounds could they object? There are people who truly believe that reincarnation happens, but there is no evidence that links reality with that idea, just as there is no evidence to link creationism with reality.
The reality is that the universe simply is. If there were a creator, that creator made the universe appear to be very old and very structured. For all intents and purposes, the nature of the universe is such that it presents itself to us as being this way. In other words, the universe is either very old and structured or its laws endowed by its creator make it appear to be something it is not. Which of these things can be proven?
Schools are for teaching science and reason, not religion. The constitution explicitly says the government will not establish religion. Why do people insist upon having the government teach their children religion rather than church? Who is the better faith-leader: a committee, or a reverend?
The "market" was defined as "operating systems for x86 compatible computers", which restricted the market in a manner that excluded Apple from the calculation.
Check the parent next time; we've already covered this:
If I go to buy a computer today, I can choose between one running Windows, one running Mac OS X, and one running RedHat. Or I can buy a computer without an OS and install another Linux distro or FreeBSD or... Need I go on?
The point was that things are pointed out in the Bible that are before their time and we now know them to be true. Not that BECAUSE they're in the Bible they're true (that is just a stupid argument to make to a non-believer).
And my point is that being pointed out in the Bible and later being found to be true are totally separate. The passages in question are vague and obscure references, worthy of Thrashbarg and Nostradamus. We take vague references and attempt to find truth in them. It's the same as the so-called 9/11 prediction. People actually believed that shit, and ironically enough the original verse came from a paper written debunking Nostradamus and demonstrating how anything sufficiently vague can be proven to be true.
"Three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.
"Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products.
"The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest."
That's the handwriting of a US District Judge in response to a lawsuit filed by the federal government against Microsoft because they believed they were a monopoly. As you may remember, Microsoft has been punished for this after agreeing with the government that it would not be possible to escape punishment and accepting a consent decree. You can read about it here:
This isn't an issue of their product's desirability, it's an issue of Microsoft using its influence over the operating systems market to unfairly prevent competition, in turn hurting the market and the general good while enriching Microsoft.
So if he would have said, just "simple truths" his point would hold water?
I'd say no, but it's open to argument. My reason for saying no is that being true--in this context--means the way by which it can be found to be true must also be true. Divine revelation conveniently defies reason and exempts itself from proof, which makes it no better than a good guess.
I mean, it seems to make sense to me. He did stress the bible isn't/doesn't intend to be scientific document.
I'm quite sure he didn't mean to imply that those statements were made with the backing of scientific research, but rather divine revelation.
Divine revelation is hearsay, not proof. Divine revelation as an argument for accuracy is only guesswork.
The Bible, while not a scientific document (and it does not intend to be one) does hold some VERY accurate, simple scientific truths. While his contemporaries believed the world to be flat (along with science at the time), the prophet Isaiah spoke of "the circle of the earth". Another scripture speaks of the Earth hanging by nothing, which is accurate.
Don't confuse one correct statement out of thousands of proclamations with the scientific process.
Galileo learned what he did through study and could prove it. Isaiah speaking of the "circle of the earth" and scripture saying the earth hangs by nothing hold no more "simple scientific truth" than a missive from Nostradamus.
The ideas presented are not science. No matter how you look at it, we cannot assume that scientific process was used to come to those conclusions--they're statements without the all important thing called proof. Faith is not proof.
Besides, we all know it's turtles all the way down.
Open Source advocates believe in informed consent.
Unfortunately, open source developers don't believe in finishing projects. Has anyone noticed that software companies release products with final version numbers on each release? Picasa 2, PowerDVD 6, Trillian 3, Winamp 5, Nero 6. There's a reason, and it's both economical and psychological. Open source developers tend not to do this, either because they don't want to let go of the project or never had their own wishes fulfilled for the product or [insert lame excuse here].
I've seen applications go through alpha stages for years -- look at ffdshow, or FlaskMPEG for example. Applications have gone through entire re-writes and remained less than v1.0. Constant tinkering is fine, but that doesn't mean that your software has to be at version 0.0.1.23.8b alpha RC2 for six years. There comes a time when a product reaches version 1.0, and unfortunately that has been lost on many young developers. "Feature-complete" may as well be in another language.
This is one of the reasons many open source projects will never be picked up by others or taken seriously. People need product, and version numbers below 1.0 consistently have the developers' fingers deep in them or no maintainer at all. No one wants to ramp up usage of something that will change next week, and if the last version is 0.325 Beta and was released a year ago, no one will touch it out of concern that it's complete crap. After all, if it wasn't good enough for the developer to get to vserion 1, why would it be good enough for use?
These are psychological reasons whose only resolution is with the developers. We lose a lot of good software this way. Unfortunately, something not taught in CS classes is that software development isn't always about the code. Why crank out a developer when you can crank out a code monkey?
When one of those buyers is a mothers who then gives birth to a malformed crack-baby.
When one of those buyers gets so addicted to meth that his teeth fall out.
When one of those buyers looses the will to live and dies in a dim corner. alone, in desperation.
These things can (and do, quite often) happen to the homeless as well. Malnourishment causes the first two; homelessness at all can cause the third. Why don't we outlaw being poor?
...again, Windows-D doesn't minimize anything. It brings the desktop to the front. Windows-M actually minimizes windows, which is why windows that can't be minimized aren't affected.
Windows-D shows the desktop. It's the equivalent of the quick launch "Show Desktop" icon. It doesn't actually minimize the windows, it just brings the desktop to the front. Pressing it again undoes the action.
The movie is not the whole series. You're missing prehistoric earth, Milliways, the Krikkit wars, Fenchurch, God's last message to creation, Ronald Reagan in a broken indestructible ship, Rupert, Stavromula Beta, the multi-dimensional Guide, Arthur and Trillian's daughter, Vogons controlling the Guide offices...
Good for some games, maybe, but throw on a RAID5+ controller with two or three GB nics needed for redundancy. Fill up a storage array and put some serious "work" on it and you'll see how long you stay up if you don't freeze up due to compatibility issues (if you have any that will work with this chipset).
Do the same with a Celeron 1.4 GHz and and an old sub $75 dollar Intel board and you'll run into the same problems. You're talking about running a medium sized server off a Duron -- get with the program here, buddy. It's not a matter of platform, it's a matter of the throughput and capability of the board.
Anyone that tries to use a desktop board, desktop processor, and desktop memory for a server with a RAID 5 array and multiple gigabit ethernet links is an idiot that deserves to crash and burn. Neither Intel nor AMD have motherboards in that price range for that performance level that can support that much traffic across the PCI bus. This is why they make servers. This is why there are $75 motherboards and $400 motherboards.
Put up an Opteron server and a Xeon server with the same configs, throw them head to head, and the results come out like the typical desktop results. Intel leads on some benchmarks, AMD on others, and the fanboys end up drawing ridiculous comparisons to claim they're right.
We don't have modular batteries for electric cars with robots that move the batteries underground for recharging because it's a ridiculous idea. No offense, man, but re-read that sentence again. There was an article floating around Fark recently about a man that owns a gas station whose gas pumps can only charge up to $1.99. If there's a guy out there that can't afford to get his pump upgraded to the current price of gas, there is no way he can afford a robot or surplus batteries or the excavation of his property for the underground storage.
Even then, who would pay to charge the batteries? The station owner? The government? The robots?
Wind and hydroelectric power have a very low yield. It is not feasible to imagine that those two energy sources could provide power for the country's cars.
While your fanciful idea sounds great on screen, it leaves out crucial parts of reality. It's a better idea to figure out ways to transition from gas cars than it is to build a nation-wide infrastructure of robots and battery charging plants. By the time such a thing would even be possible to implement, oil would be a memory of the past, and thus we would not necessarily need to move away from gas powered vehicles to robot-powered vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
So rather than restricting the rights of the government to take your money and spend it on others, you want to restrict the rights of the individual to do with their bodies as they see fit?
Yeah, your way is much better. Everybody wins!
I don't think someone selling marijuana should enjoy the same limited rights as a murderer--yet it happens all the time.
Rather than finding new and creative ways to maintain the status quo of crime punishment in America, I think money should be spent on creating equity in the criminal justice system and finding new, less expensive ways to punish prisoners.
An example is a program in (at least) California which permits sex offenders to be released from prison early in exchange for their testicles. I believe the program applies only to non-violet sex offenders. It is entirely voluntary and strict measures are taken to ensure that the removal of the balls will have the desired effect. I don't immediately see any problem with this method of punishment -- more care is given to being sure of the efficacy of the program than is given in being sure prison is effective at reducing recidivism. Further, this is specifically targeting one of the major enablers of sexual activity without mucking about in an offender's brain or punishing someone for having a brain that has developed a certain way. Believers in the sanctity of the person win, believers in the safety of the populace win, the offender loses, and the punishment is served. Keep in mind those are arguable points, but it's what I believe.
I'm surprised more attention hasn't been paid to it, especially in light of the (literally) Draconian punishments for sexual assault in Colorado. Attaching devices to the genitals of prisoners to observe their reactions to pornography that is considered violent towards women (yet is still sold on the streets and available for anyone to download to see female actors agreeing to act in exchange for payment) is not an appropriate method for determining whether someone will offend again. Sex is the most natural thing people can do, and punishing someone for having irrepressible, instinctual sexual thoughts should be a crime, not the other way around.
I believe the shortcomings of the system that should be addressed are at the foundation of the system. Problems like ballooning prisoner populations are symptoms of a failing system.
Yes, you can, but the HyperText Transport Protocol abstracts that for you and allows you to send commands in plaintext straight over the wire.
/
telnet slashdot.org 80
GET
works wonders.
It's estimated that it will be six hundred years before it is safe for people to live in some areas around Chernobyl. For a sense of scale, six hundred years ago people didn't know there were continents on this side of the Atlantic. People are scared of nuclear power for a reason, and it's their right to be.
You've got me on the cost, though; there are people for whom significant cost is incurred per kilobyte, but those people probably aren't going to opt-in for newsletters whose content will vary in length without being conscious of the possibility that it'll be in HTML by default.
For those occasions when they do get an inappropriately large message, failure to opt-out or change the delivery preference is entirely on them. You're right. That is an inevitable problem with HTML email. It's why many email programs are now blocking external images by default. Even gmail and hotmail are doing this. You missed the point; you could substitute slashdot for any other site in the gopher reference and it would still be true that for some information it is better to use styles and images than plaintext. Sometimes plaintext is better than the bells and whistles. I was refuting a specific false claim. So is HTTP. So your spam filter based on your training filters your email to your preference? You've got to be kidding.
The point is HTML email isn't going anywhere. Email is a very flexible system and things like HTML and attachments are exploitations of it. If the manner in which people craft their email is not acceptable to someone, then it's up to them to do something about it.
The problem is that this opens the door to a host of other bullshit ideas. If we give credence to ideas that cannot be proven and outright defy proof then we will slowly slide into giving other such ideas weight.
Would creationists object to the teaching of reincarnation in schools? On what grounds could they object? There are people who truly believe that reincarnation happens, but there is no evidence that links reality with that idea, just as there is no evidence to link creationism with reality.
The reality is that the universe simply is. If there were a creator, that creator made the universe appear to be very old and very structured. For all intents and purposes, the nature of the universe is such that it presents itself to us as being this way. In other words, the universe is either very old and structured or its laws endowed by its creator make it appear to be something it is not. Which of these things can be proven?
Schools are for teaching science and reason, not religion. The constitution explicitly says the government will not establish religion. Why do people insist upon having the government teach their children religion rather than church? Who is the better faith-leader: a committee, or a reverend?
Televisions may be another story, but there are cheap 1080i displays to be had.
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_index.htm
This isn't an issue of their product's desirability, it's an issue of Microsoft using its influence over the operating systems market to unfairly prevent competition, in turn hurting the market and the general good while enriching Microsoft.
Wrong: encrypt the RAR file and you're all set. There is a built in option for doing this in RAR.
Galileo learned what he did through study and could prove it. Isaiah speaking of the "circle of the earth" and scripture saying the earth hangs by nothing hold no more "simple scientific truth" than a missive from Nostradamus.
The ideas presented are not science. No matter how you look at it, we cannot assume that scientific process was used to come to those conclusions--they're statements without the all important thing called proof. Faith is not proof.
Besides, we all know it's turtles all the way down.
I've seen applications go through alpha stages for years -- look at ffdshow, or FlaskMPEG for example. Applications have gone through entire re-writes and remained less than v1.0. Constant tinkering is fine, but that doesn't mean that your software has to be at version 0.0.1.23.8b alpha RC2 for six years. There comes a time when a product reaches version 1.0, and unfortunately that has been lost on many young developers. "Feature-complete" may as well be in another language.
This is one of the reasons many open source projects will never be picked up by others or taken seriously. People need product, and version numbers below 1.0 consistently have the developers' fingers deep in them or no maintainer at all. No one wants to ramp up usage of something that will change next week, and if the last version is 0.325 Beta and was released a year ago, no one will touch it out of concern that it's complete crap. After all, if it wasn't good enough for the developer to get to vserion 1, why would it be good enough for use?
These are psychological reasons whose only resolution is with the developers. We lose a lot of good software this way. Unfortunately, something not taught in CS classes is that software development isn't always about the code. Why crank out a developer when you can crank out a code monkey?
Let's all leave our front doors unlocked, too. And our keys in our cars.
It's documented in the Help. If you have Windows XP, it's this entry:
l .htm
ms-its:C:\WINDOWS\Help\keyshort.chm::/keys_genera
Without the space.
...again, Windows-D doesn't minimize anything. It brings the desktop to the front. Windows-M actually minimizes windows, which is why windows that can't be minimized aren't affected.
Windows-D shows the desktop. It's the equivalent of the quick launch "Show Desktop" icon. It doesn't actually minimize the windows, it just brings the desktop to the front. Pressing it again undoes the action.
Windows-M actually minimizes each window.
The movie is not the whole series. You're missing prehistoric earth, Milliways, the Krikkit wars, Fenchurch, God's last message to creation, Ronald Reagan in a broken indestructible ship, Rupert, Stavromula Beta, the multi-dimensional Guide, Arthur and Trillian's daughter, Vogons controlling the Guide offices...
Have you even read all the books?
Anyone that tries to use a desktop board, desktop processor, and desktop memory for a server with a RAID 5 array and multiple gigabit ethernet links is an idiot that deserves to crash and burn. Neither Intel nor AMD have motherboards in that price range for that performance level that can support that much traffic across the PCI bus. This is why they make servers. This is why there are $75 motherboards and $400 motherboards.
Put up an Opteron server and a Xeon server with the same configs, throw them head to head, and the results come out like the typical desktop results. Intel leads on some benchmarks, AMD on others, and the fanboys end up drawing ridiculous comparisons to claim they're right.
We don't have modular batteries for electric cars with robots that move the batteries underground for recharging because it's a ridiculous idea. No offense, man, but re-read that sentence again. There was an article floating around Fark recently about a man that owns a gas station whose gas pumps can only charge up to $1.99. If there's a guy out there that can't afford to get his pump upgraded to the current price of gas, there is no way he can afford a robot or surplus batteries or the excavation of his property for the underground storage.
Even then, who would pay to charge the batteries? The station owner? The government? The robots?
Wind and hydroelectric power have a very low yield. It is not feasible to imagine that those two energy sources could provide power for the country's cars.
While your fanciful idea sounds great on screen, it leaves out crucial parts of reality. It's a better idea to figure out ways to transition from gas cars than it is to build a nation-wide infrastructure of robots and battery charging plants. By the time such a thing would even be possible to implement, oil would be a memory of the past, and thus we would not necessarily need to move away from gas powered vehicles to robot-powered vehicles.