Indeed, this policy of the school's is evil in so many ways, I think we should all print and save copies of the articles describing it, with full and complete reference information. This story is so outrageous, five years from now people will think it's an urban legend! (On the other hand, the story probably will generate an urban legend - every so often a chain-letter or chain-fax will pop up attributing these policies to a different school, or something...)
Ask and ye shall receive... but that's almost silly. Six moderator points? Wow. (I agree with 'em, by the way, although perhaps one more point was spent than is really necessary...:-)
I consider all forms of advertising evil, but coercing students into being walking ads is far more evil than Geocities pop-ups or tree-killing billboards. Frankly, that alone would give me a desire to host a burn-your-ID-card party even without having SSNs in the picture.
On the other hand, I have rather more of a beef with the school than with Pepsi for such a deal. At least Pepsi is just doing what comes naturally to a corporation.
On the other hand, it's a promising sign that a presidential candidate is willing to see Internet geeks as a group to pander to rather than demonize...
Still, I have to agree with some of the other posters, and say that making the Internet a tax-free zone is unfair to those who can't afford to get on the Internet in the first place.
Is your money ours too? Is my money yours? Is there any money that belongs to an individual, rather than the nation, and if not, why not just have the government confiscate everyone's stuff and split it 250 million ways?
I appreciate your sentiment (after all, one law for everyone does sometimes amount to little more than "the rich and the poor alike are forbidden from sleeping on park benches"), but you really need to think this through some more.
Except that, as someone else pointed out, libxml is GPL, not LGPL. Of course, if you're already an ardent Free Software advocate already, or if you're just using it for your own little project that you don't care if it's released, this isn't a problem. But Richard Stallman hasn't taken over the world yet.:-)
What you do to put tags into a Slashdot post is you escape the angle brackets. For example, instead of putting , put <. And, of course, represent & signs as &.
Um, but XML is still separate AND text-based. The point is that every app that needs a config file doesn't need to roll its own parser, they can go find someone else's XML parser whose license is consistent with what they want to do, and use that.
That's what the original poster meant by distinguishing "easy to use" from "easy to learn". It's very hard to find out that typing "ntsysv" does what you need, as you correctly pointed out. But once you know that fact, you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to type in the six letters and press ENTER. Whereas "click Start, select Settings, select Control Panel" is far easier to learn, but you have to move your hand to the mouse and wait for all the pretty menus and windows to finish deploying. Or at least, that's how I'm interpreting the argument.
Unless you live near the ocean... I used to live on a barrier island in Florida (basically, an overgrown sandbar right next to the Atlantic), and the phone lines for our local area were buried many decades ago. With the water table in the area being as high as it was, the lines got noisy any time there was a serious rainstorm. Before I moved away, they were busily stringing overhead lines to replace/supplement the existing buried ones. Buried lines may stay good longer, but they're more expensive to replace when they do go. It's a tradeoff; and of course if you don't live in an area with a water table five feet below ground level (which is the vast majority), buried lines may be the superior option.
Any minor or mentally ill person can walk into a gun show and buy a machine gun (one in Pomona, California was selling rocket launchers and grenades as well; gun shows there routinely sell machineguns - no questions asked).
I'd really, really like to see an independent reference for this - particularly the part about machine guns. Fully automatic weapons are already heavily regulated, even in the "gun-lover's paradise" United States. I could believe that there might have been machine guns, rocket launchers, or grenades at the gun show, but you're going to have to back up your remark about "any minor or mentally ill person" if you expect me to believe it - all of those weapons are quite definitely illegal to sell to just anyone. Even I couldn't buy those legally, not unless I was willing to shell out big bucks and undergo the intrusive and extensive background check needed to get the necessary license.
Can someone please, please patent the practice of posting "I'm gonna patent X" where X is something inane? So that we can get rid of this plague every time a patent story comes up.
Or is this something we're going to be stuck with Forever(tm), like "First Post", "Let's make this a Beowulf cluster", and "Slashdot is going downhill"?
I was going to post about the interaction between the Slashdot and Microsoft cards, but it occurred to me that you could emulate the same effects in a much more general fashion, provided there's enough cards to which this applies: Add a new alignment. Slashdot has OpenSource alignment, Microsoft has ClosedSource alignment. Reconsider all the other cards for which alignment they should have. (Obviously, whether the source is open or closed is irrelevant to the Illuminated power groups - they can see all the sources they want.:)
If there aren't enough cards for which this alignment makes sense, then just add a rule that Slashdot and Microsoft interact as if they each have an extra alignment that opposes the other's.
I agree with another poster, though, that Slashdot shouldn't really have any outgoing arrows. It's not really set up to Control other power groups directly. On another note, will the new Illuminati editions have a Linux Community or equivalent card, I wonder? (Guess I'll find out when my order comes in... *_*)
While the SJG game Illuminati does indeed draw massively from the RAW series, it's not entirely clear to me that RAW invented the Illuminati. The actual Illuminati organization may never have existed , but that doesn't mean belief in the Illuminati didn't.
I don't know one way or the other, myself - RAW may have invented the Illuminati as a name for the Worldwide Conspiracy he wanted to write about, or he may have drawn the name of a Worldwide Conspiracy that someone already thought existed. I can't help but imagine that RAW would have found it amusing to do the latter - he might have been hoping that those in the Region of Thud that actually believed the Illuminati existed would latch onto his Illuminatus! trilogy as a documentary work.
Well, duh. If you came out in favor of a position that is not only almost universally condemned, but outright illegal in most jurisdictions, would you post your name? Sick, yes. In need of help, yes. Idiots, no - idiots would've posted with their name.
It's hard to tell. I've heard tell that seasonal affective disorder, which is basically depression linked to shorter daylight hours in the winter, can be treated by daily exposure to high-intensity banks of flourescent lights. But my understanding is fuzzy, and the lights may have been carefully selected for a spectrum that differs from ordinary flourescent tubes. (Incandescent or halogen bulbs could do the same, but may be less safe due to the heat produced - I don't know.)
No, it didn't. It thought it did, but it didn't. The fact is, we don't know how simple a collection of chemical structures can be while still able to self-replicate, or how complex a chemical structure can be made by nonliving processes. And without knowing those things, we cannot really estimate the probability.
Abiogenesis is the subject of ongoing research, and while we've a long way to go before demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt it's possible, the issue cannot be dismissed by something as simple-minded as the paper you quoted.
Actually, speciation events have been observed, both in the lab and in nature. References available upon request. Besides, if some calamity killed off all dogs except for the chihuahua and Great Dane, would this not be speciation? After all, chihuahuas and Great Danes can't mate directly. (At least, not unless the male chihuahua uses a stepladder ^_^... er, I don't want to think about the opposite pairing...)
This is a little confused. Saying that God is infinite certainly doesn't imply that all matter is "part" of God. On the other hand, the rest of your points are still sensible if you replace them with the correct omni- concepts: How does evil come to exist in a universe created by an omniscient and omnipotent god? And can an omnipotent god create a stone it can't lift, or having created such a thing, lift it?
Me, I'm playing with the concept that God exists, and is theoretically omnipotent and omniscient but has a finite attention span. The concept has a certain appeal - it "explains" an awful lot of the apparent inconsistencies that I see in Christian theology. It'd "explain" the Holocaust, for example - maybe he was distracted by preventing a huge meteor from crashing into the inhabited planet Xordax, or something.
It's because in the United States, Christianity is overwhelmingly the predominant form of theism. If the US had a larger proportion of militant Muslims, for example (a proportion large enough to set policy at least in local areas), you'd see a lot more references to Islam.
I feel I should point out that Michael Behe does indeed have a Ph.D in biochemistry, though none of the work he has published in official journals incorporates his work on intelligent design.
On the other hand... I think the stone arch completely demolishes the notion of irreducible complexity. A stone arch is irreducibly complex - remove one stone and the structure collapses. Which is why you must have a scaffolding when building a stone arch, after which you remove the scaffolding. Since the "scaffolding" that went into building things like the blood clotting cascade is long gone, it's pointless to look for it, or conclude that the things are "designed" because it isn't there.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, this policy of the school's is evil in so many ways, I think we should all print and save copies of the articles describing it, with full and complete reference information. This story is so outrageous, five years from now people will think it's an urban legend! (On the other hand, the story probably will generate an urban legend - every so often a chain-letter or chain-fax will pop up attributing these policies to a different school, or something...)
Ask and ye shall receive... but that's almost silly. Six moderator points? Wow. (I agree with 'em, by the way, although perhaps one more point was spent than is really necessary... :-)
On the other hand, I have rather more of a beef with the school than with Pepsi for such a deal. At least Pepsi is just doing what comes naturally to a corporation.
Still, I have to agree with some of the other posters, and say that making the Internet a tax-free zone is unfair to those who can't afford to get on the Internet in the first place.
I appreciate your sentiment (after all, one law for everyone does sometimes amount to little more than "the rich and the poor alike are forbidden from sleeping on park benches"), but you really need to think this through some more.
Except that, as someone else pointed out, libxml is GPL, not LGPL. Of course, if you're already an ardent Free Software advocate already, or if you're just using it for your own little project that you don't care if it's released, this isn't a problem. But Richard Stallman hasn't taken over the world yet. :-)
Except that preview does strange things to that. Oh dear. To repeat what I said without previewing, use < instead of <.
What you do to put tags into a Slashdot post is you escape the angle brackets. For example, instead of putting , put <. And, of course, represent & signs as &.
Um, but XML is still separate AND text-based. The point is that every app that needs a config file doesn't need to roll its own parser, they can go find someone else's XML parser whose license is consistent with what they want to do, and use that.
That's what the original poster meant by distinguishing "easy to use" from "easy to learn". It's very hard to find out that typing "ntsysv" does what you need, as you correctly pointed out. But once you know that fact, you don't have to move your hands from the keyboard to type in the six letters and press ENTER. Whereas "click Start, select Settings, select Control Panel" is far easier to learn, but you have to move your hand to the mouse and wait for all the pretty menus and windows to finish deploying. Or at least, that's how I'm interpreting the argument.
Unless you live near the ocean... I used to live on a barrier island in Florida (basically, an overgrown sandbar right next to the Atlantic), and the phone lines for our local area were buried many decades ago. With the water table in the area being as high as it was, the lines got noisy any time there was a serious rainstorm. Before I moved away, they were busily stringing overhead lines to replace/supplement the existing buried ones. Buried lines may stay good longer, but they're more expensive to replace when they do go. It's a tradeoff; and of course if you don't live in an area with a water table five feet below ground level (which is the vast majority), buried lines may be the superior option.
Or is this something we're going to be stuck with Forever(tm), like "First Post", "Let's make this a Beowulf cluster", and "Slashdot is going downhill"?
If there aren't enough cards for which this alignment makes sense, then just add a rule that Slashdot and Microsoft interact as if they each have an extra alignment that opposes the other's.
I agree with another poster, though, that Slashdot shouldn't really have any outgoing arrows. It's not really set up to Control other power groups directly. On another note, will the new Illuminati editions have a Linux Community or equivalent card, I wonder? (Guess I'll find out when my order comes in... *_*)
I don't know one way or the other, myself - RAW may have invented the Illuminati as a name for the Worldwide Conspiracy he wanted to write about, or he may have drawn the name of a Worldwide Conspiracy that someone already thought existed. I can't help but imagine that RAW would have found it amusing to do the latter - he might have been hoping that those in the Region of Thud that actually believed the Illuminati existed would latch onto his Illuminatus! trilogy as a documentary work.
Shoot a black helicopter for me. :)
Well, duh. If you came out in favor of a position that is not only almost universally condemned, but outright illegal in most jurisdictions, would you post your name? Sick, yes. In need of help, yes. Idiots, no - idiots would've posted with their name.
Ten to one this person hasn't had so much as a whiff of cannabis in his/her life, and just has something against those who may have...
It's hard to tell. I've heard tell that seasonal affective disorder, which is basically depression linked to shorter daylight hours in the winter, can be treated by daily exposure to high-intensity banks of flourescent lights. But my understanding is fuzzy, and the lights may have been carefully selected for a spectrum that differs from ordinary flourescent tubes. (Incandescent or halogen bulbs could do the same, but may be less safe due to the heat produced - I don't know.)
Abiogenesis is the subject of ongoing research, and while we've a long way to go before demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt it's possible, the issue cannot be dismissed by something as simple-minded as the paper you quoted.
Actually, speciation events have been observed, both in the lab and in nature. References available upon request. Besides, if some calamity killed off all dogs except for the chihuahua and Great Dane, would this not be speciation? After all, chihuahuas and Great Danes can't mate directly. (At least, not unless the male chihuahua uses a stepladder ^_^... er, I don't want to think about the opposite pairing...)
Me, I'm playing with the concept that God exists, and is theoretically omnipotent and omniscient but has a finite attention span. The concept has a certain appeal - it "explains" an awful lot of the apparent inconsistencies that I see in Christian theology. It'd "explain" the Holocaust, for example - maybe he was distracted by preventing a huge meteor from crashing into the inhabited planet Xordax, or something.
It's because in the United States, Christianity is overwhelmingly the predominant form of theism. If the US had a larger proportion of militant Muslims, for example (a proportion large enough to set policy at least in local areas), you'd see a lot more references to Islam.
That said, I still haven't seen anyone coherently explain why we should conclude that the early Earth's atmosphere was oxidating.
On the other hand... I think the stone arch completely demolishes the notion of irreducible complexity. A stone arch is irreducibly complex - remove one stone and the structure collapses. Which is why you must have a scaffolding when building a stone arch, after which you remove the scaffolding. Since the "scaffolding" that went into building things like the blood clotting cascade is long gone, it's pointless to look for it, or conclude that the things are "designed" because it isn't there.