A CEO is a slave to his board of directors, and in turn, to his stockholders. If he tries to improve employee morale instead of increasing his bottom line, he could get sued, fired, or hollered at by the board. Also I might point out that in the example you used, when one CEO had blown a bunch of money and gotten himself fired, the younger CEO you suggested would be hired wouldn't be hanging around being friendly to the staff. Far from it. He would be cracking the whip and chopping heads, because the board would want him to make up the money the previous guy lost and the easiest way to cut costs is to cut staff and increase the workload of the remainder
That's too harsh. While some CEOs would do it, if it causes a downward spiral we'd have corrective measures to increase morale. Happier workers work better, and any CEO worth his MBA knows this. And the good ones--the ones that deserve those huge, outrageous salaries--know that getting the staff to the ideal level and getting them highly motivated is the best way to have a profitable business.
But it's possible to find a small businessman who actually cares about his people, and work for HIM. A private owner isn't trapped by a board of directors. If he wants to take a slight hit during a tough year, and not fire people, he can without getting sued or fired. If he wants to help out someone on his staff, he can do so. And, in return, if his staff treats him well, he knows who's doing a good job and what's being done.
Actually, you can find as many CEOs of major corporations who care about the staff as you can small businessmen. Smart Boards realize this, find CEOs who do this, and essentially let them work. The biggest difference between a CEO of a major corp and a small business owner is that the CEO is playing with someone else's money, so often is more careful with the long-term results than the small businessman is.
Don't get me wrong--I'm as virulent a hater of corporate personhood as the next/.'er. But, like I said in the last post, until we change the rules, we can expect them to continue as-is.
(A historical note: Modern corporations are, AFAIK, descended from Renaissance-era shipping companies, where several speculators would pool their funds to finance a profitable sea voyage to India or Asia. And this is a good thing for CEOs who don't stand up to their boards to know, as well.)
See, I think our culture (I mean, U.S. culture, but the phenomenon is reaching out to the rest of the world) is entering a nasty feedback loop. First, corporations try to maximize profits by laying everyone off and outsourcing everything outsourceable.
Ah, there you go. Two faults right there.
"The West" can (and should) be thought of as a single civilization, stretching throughout almost all of the world and dating back to, oh, sometime shortly after the fall of Rome. So it's not a "cultural" problem--rather, the problem--if it exists--is a civilizational one.
Now, as for the other: Not all CEOs respond the same way, and even those that DO use layoffs to cut costs will hit a floor where they simply can't cut anyone else. Plus, a CEO who loses money again and again will be fired, and probably replaced by a ambitious (ex) middle-class employee who will hire on more and more and do what it takes to boost employee morale again.
Oh, one more thing:
For instance, when people can't afford to buy the latest HP or Compaq, you might be able to sell them a custom built gamer PC if you can find the parts on inexpensive web-catalog sites.
HP, Dell, etc. exist because they can take direct advantage of the same economy of scale that those catalog sites do. If push comes to shove, expect the OEMs to produce their own dirt-cheap models to adapt to the changing market.
Corporate America is _very_ efficient at what it does; unless you change the rules of the game, you can expect American Capitalism to continue "forever."
That's right. But Government is neither good nor evil--rather, it's a civil restraint of both.
An evil government that works as designed corrupt--it's just evil. The totalitarian regime we've got in Iraq isn't corrupt at all--it's doing exactly what its evil masters want it to.
If you buy "the data" (which you didn't--you bought a copy of the data which includes the right to make reasonable and necessary copies for personal use), you can go ahead and put it in yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you--or pay the original company for a second copy of the data.
Or you can do what I do, and not use Wizards of the Coast material that's not OGL'd or in the SRD. Any gamer on/. should understand my reasoning.
You might want to check out his new MMORPG [gamepoint.net], based off his Paper-and-Pencil game Lejendary Adventure. A FAQ on the online game is here [gamepoint.net].
For those who aren't gaming-geeks:
Yes, that's spelled correctly. After getting booted out of TSR, Gary decided that he could write the rules however he wanted and still be successful--and, apparantly, he also decided that he could just rename everything randomly, possibly because he came up with the name in the first place.
As I understand it, Mr. Gygax as every bit as fanatical a fanboy following as Stallman, or the late J.R.R. Tolkien. (Obviously, I'm not in either camp.)
Maybe in the not-doing-their-job sense, but in my personal opinion, they are "corrupt" if they are not working to maximize benefit to the society as a whole. If the laws aren't designed to maximize benefit to the society as a whole, then the law is corrupted.
Corrupt != "not doing your job."
And, in any case, drug laws _were_ intended to maximize benefit to society as a whole. They just haven't been repealed or changed yet.
Of course, by that standard, the US legal system is drowning in corruption. I don't know why people keep asking me why I'm so cynical about the system.
I sure as hell don't want the _legal system_ trying to maximize benefit for society as a whole--I want it concnered soley with the fair and equitable appliation of the laws we have.
I want my elected officals concerned with society as a whole--and I don't want real judges elected.
people cannot break into my files now. that is what pgp is for
But can you allow people to read your files but not print/copy/edit them?
MS sounds like they're just moving to the same "security" funcionality that Adobe has for Acrobat. I can't see how this is a bad thing; I can see how it could be abused, but I can't see how it is automatically a bad thing.
(*) If anyone has a problem with me accusing the US government of being corrupt, feel free to explain the rationale for letting rapists and murderers go free while non-violent drug offenders.
Well, who goes free and who gets convicted is a function of a randomly chosen population sample, not the government. Plus, if they follow the law, no matter what the laws says, then they're not "corrupt" in the "not doing their jobs" sense.
If a state government wanted to pass a puritanical "no kissing in public" law, they'd be well within their jurisdiction to do so, and the officers and judges and lawyers carrying out this law wouldn't be corrupt.
I agree that extremely violent offenses such as rape and murder should, without exception, give higher sentences than any other kind of crime. But that doesn't mean that a government that puts drug offenders and prank-hackers in jail for twice what the average rate for murderers is corrupt. Extreme, maybe, but not corrupt.
(And if you counter with "will of the people", I'll want to know an update on the status of the movement for a constitutional amendment requiring equitable and fair sentencing throughout the country.)
From which, one might conclude that he never did. And one might further conclude that there's no such character...
Yes, you might. The Bible explicitly states that God wants man to doubt, and thus know how deep man's faith is. I believe in God, and with that as a given as much as I believe that gravity is what keeps me on the round Earth, I can use logic and supposition and deduction to guess at the nonvital characteristics of God.
Why?
I mean, do you believe it just 'cause it sounds cool, or do you have some chain of reasoning that leads you towards this conclusion?
Here's my reasoning.
1: God created Everything. 2: We don't see anything in the Universe that could be sentient and construct all of the universe. 3: Ergo, if God Exists, he must exist seperate from the Universe that we can percieve and extrapolate from our perceptions.
There are two other possible explanations--namely, God could exist within the Universe and use his Omnipotent powers to hide himself (and possibly much of the universe) from us, though this would perclude God from creating the Universe, or that God and the Universe are co-existant--which would require God to be self-creating, which though I can comprehend in and of itself, I do not believe that God would then create internally all of the Universe if he had a choice--and, since a definitive aspect of God is Omnipotence, I believe that He did not.
According to Newton' "Law" if you travel on a fast moving train and you take a torch and direct the light it produces in the direction of the train moves (ahead), the light ought to go the speed of light plus the speed of the train, which is not true.
Er, no.
Light is neither an object or a force, though it can create a force or be manipulated similarly to an object.
In a neutral reality with no curviture, no gravity, no wind, no friction, and no background radition, if you start moving on a train you will continue moving until you stop yourself--and if you fire something ahead of the train(1) it will go faster than you.
The fact that reality has things that are not actions or forces (like light or subatomic particles) does not invalidate the principles we created to express how objects and forces act upon each other.
Not much--but God is supremely intelligent, and a feature of intelligent is using tools to minimze work. If God can do something elegantly and with a minimum of disruption, or do something directly and bluntly, I suspect that He would do the former and not the latter.
I figure either science is correct, or God created the world in ~4,004 B.C., but made it exactly like it would have been had it taken 13+ billion years. And to me, it's a difference that makes no difference; heck, even in the latter case the Big Bang et al happened in God's "mind", which is effectively as "real" as the universe.
I agree in all but the last part. Either Science is correct and the universe is litterally Y plank-seconds old, or God created it at Y-X and made it look like He did it at Y, which ammount to the same thing for all practical purposes.
With the creationists, you change definitions or just use intentionally poorly defined terms but never give up your core religious belief in a "literal" Biblical creation.
I'm going to have to get into semantics here, but it is an important differnece to illuminate.
Our theoretical creationist believes mainly that God exists, that God created the world, and that the Bible is a true and accurate reporting of what happened.
Now, what he also believes, although not as a core belief, is that his interpretation of the bible is reasonable and true, and thus accuratly matches the words of a language that didn't even have vowels with current scientific discovery.
When a new scientific discovery contradicts part of our creationists dogma, he logically will examine the part of his dogma that is most prone to failure--the part that he knows beyond any doubt that mortal fallible men made--the interpretation.
Our creationist will alter what he THINKS, but keep what he BELIEVES constant, unless he suffers a crisis of faith.
Were I to swing over to the creationist absolute-controlist branch of my faith, I'd still have a hard time assuming that God doesn't unmake whole species as he unmakes individual human lives, and that he doesn't make new species as he continues to make new human lives. Feel free to use either of these if you're caught in a discussion with a creationist-zealot. (If they counter with "God doesn't touch reality anymore", your rebuttal could be "then why worshp him?")
How the heck could you know how much effort is involved? Is there a book "How To Create Worlds For Dummies" that I failed to notice last time I was at the bookstore?
Ever notice how God doesn't manifest grand miracles anymore? Part of my semi-dogma is that God works through the least disruptive methods to achieve his ends.
You could substitute "energy", "thought", or "work" for "effort" above. I believe that God exists seperate from Creation, and Creation exists seperate from God, and thus God flashing the Big Bang makes sense to me--I mean, if we want a crater that looks like it was blasted out, hollywood doesn't get some shovels and a crew of forty artists--they get a lawyer, a permit, and an explosive engineer.
Classical Physics is undisputed within a certain range of energies/time difference, but you cannot explain light causing a measurable pressure with newtons laws nor can you explain doppler shifts exactly.
Care to try that again?
Newton's three basic laws don't say what is and is not a force. If X effets an object, X is a force.
I'm not disputing that there's more than just Newton's laws out there--or that relativity, general or special, is much more precise than mere netwonian physics could ever be.
But the laws themselves are not disputed, are not repudiated, and are not proven to be anything but more true by current data. Hence, they're laws.
Relativity will probably become a law someday--but that'll take awhile.
Salad dressings.... I don't know about you, but I would never trust chemically engineered food. Don't eat anything that you can't make at home!!!!!!!! That includes chicken with no heads...:P
Hmm....
* Can't butcher in the city of Albany * Can't make bread in my crappy apartment * Can't grow vegitables * No idea how to make Tofu
So, er... what can we eat? (And why, exactly, should a species that can eat anything from carrion to dirt to dried meat worry about the genetics of its food? Unless the bugger's toxic, mutative, or just bad tasing I see no problem in eating it.)
That is why it's Eintstein's *Theory* of Special Relativity, even though it is an even more accurate rendering of Newton's "Law." We gave up laws a century or so ago.
I beg to disagree.
Newton's laws are simple, definitive, and we're unlike to find anything that contradicts them--relativity deals with the shape of space, not how objects react to motion, and quantum mechanics, as far as they effect "objects", are just another force.
Classic Physics are undisputable--they can be observed by anyone with about thirty minutes of free time (or less). Relativity, on the other hand, has a rather smaller set of supporting data, and thus calling it a "law" isn't quite accurate just yet.
While at times language changes distressingly fast there are times when it seems impossible to change at all.
Most scientific laws are hundreds of years old--they've withstood the test of time. Relativity and other modern theories haven't withstood the test of time yet, but in a few centuries we'll be talking about "Einstein's Laws."
I'm afraid the resulting confussion, allowing President's to say dumb shit like "It's only a theory,"
You mean evolution, I assume.
The principle that living creatures evolve is observable, uncontestable, and hundreds of years old. High School students can test it with rabbits. Current evolution should be taught as and called "The Law of Evolution."
Now, when biologists start speculating about the fossil record, species relations, and where life came from, they're on territory that they can never prove to have a definite answer, and thus they should either use the same terminology that historians, not labcoat scientists use, or they should stick with "theory."
The NRA? I don't know all about your U.S. organisations, but isn't that the National Rifle Association?
You are leaving them as a Beneficiary? Let me get this right.
So when you die, you can help other people join you?
No, no. You're thinking about the National Murderer's Association. The National Rifile Assocation just helps people be killed in an effiicent manner, often taking their murderers with them--as opposed to a rather gruesome knife fight.;)
The first rule of Creation Club is: as soon as your "theory" is disproven, just change your definitions and claim that's what you meant all along.
Odd, that sounds amazingly like the Scientific Method.
I believe that God created the universe that we live in. My current (nonscientific) theory on how he did this is through evolution and a "fast foward time", up until about 8,000 years ago when he made a man from scratch that just happened to be genetically compatbile with the super-apes that were walking around. Of course, God having created everything else 8,500 years ago is also a possibility, but unlikely given the extra effort needed.
So when he reports that "Windows XP" is sending a bug report, I doubt he means that the OS crashed. Instead, one of the component programs (like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express,...) crashed and is "submitting a bug report."
Actually, WinXP does this whenever ANYTHING crashes. That is, unless the crash takes out whatever does this.;)
And it's behavior that you can turn off totally, have ask you every time, or just go ahead and send without bugging you first.
This is ridiculous. We'd be stupid TO take steps to transition "the desktop" to Qt all the way down. You're the only one who wants this. Not everyone loves KDE, and even less people love Qt. The seperation of the windowing system and the actual desktop is what gives *nix users the configurability to give their desktops personality. If you want a one-size-fits-all desktop, get windows.
KDE is bloated (insomuch as it is) becasue the underlying scheme doesn't do everything that KDE wants done.
Off the top of my head, a computer needs:
1: Hardware 2: A system running the hardware, CPU, et al 3a: A system coordinating data between programs 3b: A system organizing the display of programs 4: A UI (GUI or CLI) to communicate with the user 5: Software to justify all of the above.
Linux is 2, X is 3b--but because 3a is severely limited, KDE needs to hack 4 to do 3a's job and make 5 work smoother. Since X is already 3b, it should either be tweaked to run with a new 3a, extended to cover 3a, or replaced by a new system that does 3a and 3b.
All that said (and yes, I know I'm missing formal details, I'm a geek, not a comp sci class monkey), Windows handles each part reasonably well, and even allows you to replace 4 without losing the functionality of 3a, 3b, or 5. If KDE or CYGWIN had real Windows ports to the correct parts in Windows, I'd use them--but they don't, so I don't, and so no one else does for much the same reasons.
Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.
Actually, they do. Continuing Virtual PC as-is would go a long way towards repairing their lost goodwill with the computer elite, without directly supporting Linux--which would be a death knell for Windows.
The problem with your analysis is that it really doesn't fit the law.
Of course it does. A copyright holder can use _whatever means they want to_ when they create a copy of their work. If you don't like it, don't buy from them. (see "Macrovision" or "no cameras in movie theaters")
People who have their rights infringed don't gain the right to alter uninvolved innocents lives, property, or behavior just because it makes it easy to fix their problem with wrong doers. There is something called the presumption of innocence. what you are consenting to is a regime where we are all guilty until proven innocent and we must carry around (and pay for!) our own electronic minder to ensure that we are not acting criminally today.
I think you're reading far too much into Palladium.
But the conversation isn't about DRM but Palladium.
OK, I must have missed a press release or write-up. What, exactly, is the difference between "Palladium" and "DRM"? I thought that the former was just a specific implementation of the latter.
Finally, I again urge you to study the corpus of christian doctrine. I don't think you're going to find much support for your stand that negotiation and compromise, in other words not putting your bottom line non-negotiables out as a first position, is immoral just doesn't command much respect in pretty much every branch of christianity I've ever heard of.
Asking for the whole loaf and settling for half a loaf is just how most legislation gets done. It's standard practice and raises no moral difficulties.
Once upon a time, random beheadings and rule by secular decree & military force were how things got done. Popularity doesn't make it right.
If total honesty wasn't politically effective, you'd be right. But it is--and we're talking politics, not legislators, so the chaotic methods used to reach consensus in Congress are a different matter entirely, with a different audience and a different set of rules than the court of public opinion in which the NRA operates.
I will admit that I was a bit harsh in my condemnation of the tactic. Christanity doens't divide the world into "Good things" and "sin." There's "godly acts", "sin", and "stuff that's just normal."
Slashdot Mirror
A CEO is a slave to his board of directors, and in turn, to his stockholders. If he tries to improve employee morale instead of increasing his bottom line, he could get sued, fired, or hollered at by the board. Also I might point out that in the example you used, when one CEO had blown a bunch of money and gotten himself fired, the younger CEO you suggested would be hired wouldn't be hanging around being friendly to the staff. Far from it. He would be cracking the whip and chopping heads, because the board would want him to make up the money the previous guy lost and the easiest way to cut costs is to cut staff and increase the workload of the remainder
/.'er. But, like I said in the last post, until we change the rules, we can expect them to continue as-is.
That's too harsh. While some CEOs would do it, if it causes a downward spiral we'd have corrective measures to increase morale. Happier workers work better, and any CEO worth his MBA knows this. And the good ones--the ones that deserve those huge, outrageous salaries--know that getting the staff to the ideal level and getting them highly motivated is the best way to have a profitable business.
But it's possible to find a small businessman who actually cares about his people, and work for HIM. A private owner isn't trapped by a board of directors. If he wants to take a slight hit during a tough year, and not fire people, he can without getting sued or fired. If he wants to help out someone on his staff, he can do so. And, in return, if his staff treats him well, he knows who's doing a good job and what's being done.
Actually, you can find as many CEOs of major corporations who care about the staff as you can small businessmen. Smart Boards realize this, find CEOs who do this, and essentially let them work. The biggest difference between a CEO of a major corp and a small business owner is that the CEO is playing with someone else's money, so often is more careful with the long-term results than the small businessman is.
Don't get me wrong--I'm as virulent a hater of corporate personhood as the next
(A historical note: Modern corporations are, AFAIK, descended from Renaissance-era shipping companies, where several speculators would pool their funds to finance a profitable sea voyage to India or Asia. And this is a good thing for CEOs who don't stand up to their boards to know, as well.)
Just my theory. Feel free to shred it. ;)
You asked for it.
See, I think our culture (I mean, U.S. culture, but the phenomenon is reaching out to the rest of the world) is entering a nasty feedback loop. First, corporations try to maximize profits by laying everyone off and outsourcing everything outsourceable.
Ah, there you go. Two faults right there.
"The West" can (and should) be thought of as a single civilization, stretching throughout almost all of the world and dating back to, oh, sometime shortly after the fall of Rome. So it's not a "cultural" problem--rather, the problem--if it exists--is a civilizational one.
Now, as for the other: Not all CEOs respond the same way, and even those that DO use layoffs to cut costs will hit a floor where they simply can't cut anyone else. Plus, a CEO who loses money again and again will be fired, and probably replaced by a ambitious (ex) middle-class employee who will hire on more and more and do what it takes to boost employee morale again.
Oh, one more thing:
For instance, when people can't afford to buy the latest HP or Compaq, you might be able to sell them a custom built gamer PC if you can find the parts on inexpensive web-catalog sites.
HP, Dell, etc. exist because they can take direct advantage of the same economy of scale that those catalog sites do. If push comes to shove, expect the OEMs to produce their own dirt-cheap models to adapt to the changing market.
Corporate America is _very_ efficient at what it does; unless you change the rules of the game, you can expect American Capitalism to continue "forever."
Evil persists when good men stand by.
That's right. But Government is neither good nor evil--rather, it's a civil restraint of both.
An evil government that works as designed corrupt--it's just evil. The totalitarian regime we've got in Iraq isn't corrupt at all--it's doing exactly what its evil masters want it to.
*ahem*
/. should understand my reasoning.
If you buy "the data" (which you didn't--you bought a copy of the data which includes the right to make reasonable and necessary copies for personal use), you can go ahead and put it in yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you--or pay the original company for a second copy of the data.
Or you can do what I do, and not use Wizards of the Coast material that's not OGL'd or in the SRD. Any gamer on
I wonder if the people who write press-releases are ever embarrassed by what they do.
;)
No, I'm not. Of course, the PR I write is all just swiping the nominee's submission anyway, so it's almost a stretch to call it "writing."
What would Jesus do... for a Klondike bar?
;)
Why, I suspect that he'd make it not melt, and not be too cold to bite down on even with sentiive teeth.
Or more likekly, just pay for it.
You might want to check out his new MMORPG [gamepoint.net], based off his Paper-and-Pencil game Lejendary Adventure. A FAQ on the online game is here [gamepoint.net].
For those who aren't gaming-geeks:
Yes, that's spelled correctly. After getting booted out of TSR, Gary decided that he could write the rules however he wanted and still be successful--and, apparantly, he also decided that he could just rename everything randomly, possibly because he came up with the name in the first place.
As I understand it, Mr. Gygax as every bit as fanatical a fanboy following as Stallman, or the late J.R.R. Tolkien. (Obviously, I'm not in either camp.)
Maybe in the not-doing-their-job sense, but in my personal opinion, they are "corrupt" if they are not working to maximize benefit to the society as a whole. If the laws aren't designed to maximize benefit to the society as a whole, then the law is corrupted.
Corrupt != "not doing your job."
And, in any case, drug laws _were_ intended to maximize benefit to society as a whole. They just haven't been repealed or changed yet.
Of course, by that standard, the US legal system is drowning in corruption. I don't know why people keep asking me why I'm so cynical about the system.
I sure as hell don't want the _legal system_ trying to maximize benefit for society as a whole--I want it concnered soley with the fair and equitable appliation of the laws we have.
I want my elected officals concerned with society as a whole--and I don't want real judges elected.
people cannot break into my files now. that is what pgp is for
But can you allow people to read your files but not print/copy/edit them?
MS sounds like they're just moving to the same "security" funcionality that Adobe has for Acrobat. I can't see how this is a bad thing; I can see how it could be abused, but I can't see how it is automatically a bad thing.
*sigh*
(*) If anyone has a problem with me accusing the US government of being corrupt, feel free to explain the rationale for letting rapists and murderers go free while non-violent drug offenders.
Well, who goes free and who gets convicted is a function of a randomly chosen population sample, not the government. Plus, if they follow the law, no matter what the laws says, then they're not "corrupt" in the "not doing their jobs" sense.
If a state government wanted to pass a puritanical "no kissing in public" law, they'd be well within their jurisdiction to do so, and the officers and judges and lawyers carrying out this law wouldn't be corrupt.
I agree that extremely violent offenses such as rape and murder should, without exception, give higher sentences than any other kind of crime. But that doesn't mean that a government that puts drug offenders and prank-hackers in jail for twice what the average rate for murderers is corrupt. Extreme, maybe, but not corrupt.
(And if you counter with "will of the people", I'll want to know an update on the status of the movement for a constitutional amendment requiring equitable and fair sentencing throughout the country.)
From which, one might conclude that he never did. And one might further conclude that there's no such character...
Yes, you might. The Bible explicitly states that God wants man to doubt, and thus know how deep man's faith is. I believe in God, and with that as a given as much as I believe that gravity is what keeps me on the round Earth, I can use logic and supposition and deduction to guess at the nonvital characteristics of God.
Why?
I mean, do you believe it just 'cause it sounds cool, or do you have some chain of reasoning that leads you towards this conclusion?
Here's my reasoning.
1: God created Everything.
2: We don't see anything in the Universe that could be sentient and construct all of the universe.
3: Ergo, if God Exists, he must exist seperate from the Universe that we can percieve and extrapolate from our perceptions.
There are two other possible explanations--namely, God could exist within the Universe and use his Omnipotent powers to hide himself (and possibly much of the universe) from us, though this would perclude God from creating the Universe, or that God and the Universe are co-existant--which would require God to be self-creating, which though I can comprehend in and of itself, I do not believe that God would then create internally all of the Universe if he had a choice--and, since a definitive aspect of God is Omnipotence, I believe that He did not.
According to Newton' "Law" if you travel on a fast moving train and you take a torch and direct the light it produces in the direction of the train moves (ahead), the light ought to go the speed of light plus the speed of the train, which is not true.
Er, no.
Light is neither an object or a force, though it can create a force or be manipulated similarly to an object.
In a neutral reality with no curviture, no gravity, no wind, no friction, and no background radition, if you start moving on a train you will continue moving until you stop yourself--and if you fire something ahead of the train(1) it will go faster than you.
The fact that reality has things that are not actions or forces (like light or subatomic particles) does not invalidate the principles we created to express how objects and forces act upon each other.
(1): Hey, relativity isn't one of newton's laws!
What's "effort" or "time" to God?
Not much--but God is supremely intelligent, and a feature of intelligent is using tools to minimze work. If God can do something elegantly and with a minimum of disruption, or do something directly and bluntly, I suspect that He would do the former and not the latter.
I figure either science is correct, or God created the world in ~4,004 B.C., but made it exactly like it would have been had it taken 13+ billion years. And to me, it's a difference that makes no difference; heck, even in the latter case the Big Bang et al happened in God's "mind", which is effectively as "real" as the universe.
I agree in all but the last part. Either Science is correct and the universe is litterally Y plank-seconds old, or God created it at Y-X and made it look like He did it at Y, which ammount to the same thing for all practical purposes.
With the creationists, you change definitions or just use intentionally poorly defined terms but never give up your core religious belief in a "literal" Biblical creation.
I'm going to have to get into semantics here, but it is an important differnece to illuminate.
Our theoretical creationist believes mainly that God exists, that God created the world, and that the Bible is a true and accurate reporting of what happened.
Now, what he also believes, although not as a core belief, is that his interpretation of the bible is reasonable and true, and thus accuratly matches the words of a language that didn't even have vowels with current scientific discovery.
When a new scientific discovery contradicts part of our creationists dogma, he logically will examine the part of his dogma that is most prone to failure--the part that he knows beyond any doubt that mortal fallible men made--the interpretation.
Our creationist will alter what he THINKS, but keep what he BELIEVES constant, unless he suffers a crisis of faith.
Were I to swing over to the creationist absolute-controlist branch of my faith, I'd still have a hard time assuming that God doesn't unmake whole species as he unmakes individual human lives, and that he doesn't make new species as he continues to make new human lives. Feel free to use either of these if you're caught in a discussion with a creationist-zealot. (If they counter with "God doesn't touch reality anymore", your rebuttal could be "then why worshp him?")
How the heck could you know how much effort is involved? Is there a book "How To Create Worlds For Dummies" that I failed to notice last time I was at the bookstore?
Ever notice how God doesn't manifest grand miracles anymore? Part of my semi-dogma is that God works through the least disruptive methods to achieve his ends.
You could substitute "energy", "thought", or "work" for "effort" above. I believe that God exists seperate from Creation, and Creation exists seperate from God, and thus God flashing the Big Bang makes sense to me--I mean, if we want a crater that looks like it was blasted out, hollywood doesn't get some shovels and a crew of forty artists--they get a lawyer, a permit, and an explosive engineer.
The problem with the "creationists" s/he is talking about it that they confuse science with faith, as you are doing now.
The same problem arises when atheist scientists confused faith and science. As I have said many times, "proper science is agnostic."
Also, lay off the violence buddy! How Christian (or whatever your variation) is that?
Very, actually. Equitable violence to those that wrong you is perfectly acceptable. But it's BETTER to grant mercy instead.
Classical Physics is undisputed within a certain range of energies/time difference, but you cannot explain light causing a measurable pressure with newtons laws nor can you explain doppler shifts exactly.
Care to try that again?
Newton's three basic laws don't say what is and is not a force. If X effets an object, X is a force.
I'm not disputing that there's more than just Newton's laws out there--or that relativity, general or special, is much more precise than mere netwonian physics could ever be.
But the laws themselves are not disputed, are not repudiated, and are not proven to be anything but more true by current data. Hence, they're laws.
Relativity will probably become a law someday--but that'll take awhile.
Salad dressings.... I don't know about you, but I would never trust chemically engineered food. Don't eat anything that you can't make at home!!!!!!!! That includes chicken with no heads...:P
Hmm....
* Can't butcher in the city of Albany
* Can't make bread in my crappy apartment
* Can't grow vegitables
* No idea how to make Tofu
So, er... what can we eat? (And why, exactly, should a species that can eat anything from carrion to dirt to dried meat worry about the genetics of its food? Unless the bugger's toxic, mutative, or just bad tasing I see no problem in eating it.)
That is why it's Eintstein's *Theory* of Special Relativity, even though it is an even more accurate rendering of Newton's "Law." We gave up laws a century or so ago.
I beg to disagree.
Newton's laws are simple, definitive, and we're unlike to find anything that contradicts them--relativity deals with the shape of space, not how objects react to motion, and quantum mechanics, as far as they effect "objects", are just another force.
Classic Physics are undisputable--they can be observed by anyone with about thirty minutes of free time (or less). Relativity, on the other hand, has a rather smaller set of supporting data, and thus calling it a "law" isn't quite accurate just yet.
While at times language changes distressingly fast there are times when it seems impossible to change at all.
Most scientific laws are hundreds of years old--they've withstood the test of time. Relativity and other modern theories haven't withstood the test of time yet, but in a few centuries we'll be talking about "Einstein's Laws."
I'm afraid the resulting confussion, allowing President's to say dumb shit like "It's only a theory,"
You mean evolution, I assume.
The principle that living creatures evolve is observable, uncontestable, and hundreds of years old. High School students can test it with rabbits. Current evolution should be taught as and called "The Law of Evolution."
Now, when biologists start speculating about the fossil record, species relations, and where life came from, they're on territory that they can never prove to have a definite answer, and thus they should either use the same terminology that historians, not labcoat scientists use, or they should stick with "theory."
The NRA? I don't know all about your U.S. organisations, but isn't that the National Rifle Association?
;)
You are leaving them as a Beneficiary? Let me get this right.
So when you die, you can help other people join you?
No, no. You're thinking about the National Murderer's Association. The National Rifile Assocation just helps people be killed in an effiicent manner, often taking their murderers with them--as opposed to a rather gruesome knife fight.
The first rule of Creation Club is: as soon as your "theory" is disproven, just change your definitions and claim that's what you meant all along.
Odd, that sounds amazingly like the Scientific Method.
I believe that God created the universe that we live in. My current (nonscientific) theory on how he did this is through evolution and a "fast foward time", up until about 8,000 years ago when he made a man from scratch that just happened to be genetically compatbile with the super-apes that were walking around. Of course, God having created everything else 8,500 years ago is also a possibility, but unlikely given the extra effort needed.
So when he reports that "Windows XP" is sending a bug report, I doubt he means that the OS crashed. Instead, one of the component programs (like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, ...) crashed and is "submitting a bug report."
;)
Actually, WinXP does this whenever ANYTHING crashes. That is, unless the crash takes out whatever does this.
And it's behavior that you can turn off totally, have ask you every time, or just go ahead and send without bugging you first.
This is ridiculous. We'd be stupid TO take steps to transition "the desktop" to Qt all the way down. You're the only one who wants this. Not everyone loves KDE, and even less people love Qt. The seperation of the windowing system and the actual desktop is what gives *nix users the configurability to give their desktops personality. If you want a one-size-fits-all desktop, get windows.
KDE is bloated (insomuch as it is) becasue the underlying scheme doesn't do everything that KDE wants done.
Off the top of my head, a computer needs:
1: Hardware
2: A system running the hardware, CPU, et al
3a: A system coordinating data between programs
3b: A system organizing the display of programs
4: A UI (GUI or CLI) to communicate with the user
5: Software to justify all of the above.
Linux is 2, X is 3b--but because 3a is severely limited, KDE needs to hack 4 to do 3a's job and make 5 work smoother. Since X is already 3b, it should either be tweaked to run with a new 3a, extended to cover 3a, or replaced by a new system that does 3a and 3b.
All that said (and yes, I know I'm missing formal details, I'm a geek, not a comp sci class monkey), Windows handles each part reasonably well, and even allows you to replace 4 without losing the functionality of 3a, 3b, or 5. If KDE or CYGWIN had real Windows ports to the correct parts in Windows, I'd use them--but they don't, so I don't, and so no one else does for much the same reasons.
Microsoft also has no reason *not* to stop Virtual PC from being able so cleanly, seamlessly, and easily to emulate, say, Linux. They have no reason to make it easy to run a non-MS operating system on your mac.
Actually, they do. Continuing Virtual PC as-is would go a long way towards repairing their lost goodwill with the computer elite, without directly supporting Linux--which would be a death knell for Windows.
The problem with your analysis is that it really doesn't fit the law.
Of course it does. A copyright holder can use _whatever means they want to_ when they create a copy of their work. If you don't like it, don't buy from them. (see "Macrovision" or "no cameras in movie theaters")
People who have their rights infringed don't gain the right to alter uninvolved innocents lives, property, or behavior just because it makes it easy to fix their problem with wrong doers. There is something called the presumption of innocence. what you are consenting to is a regime where we are all guilty until proven innocent and we must carry around (and pay for!) our own electronic minder to ensure that we are not acting criminally today.
I think you're reading far too much into Palladium.
But the conversation isn't about DRM but Palladium.
OK, I must have missed a press release or write-up. What, exactly, is the difference between "Palladium" and "DRM"? I thought that the former was just a specific implementation of the latter.
Finally, I again urge you to study the corpus of christian doctrine. I don't think you're going to find much support for your stand that negotiation and compromise, in other words not putting your bottom line non-negotiables out as a first position, is immoral just doesn't command much respect in pretty much every branch of christianity I've ever heard of.
Asking for the whole loaf and settling for half a loaf is just how most legislation gets done. It's standard practice and raises no moral difficulties.
Once upon a time, random beheadings and rule by secular decree & military force were how things got done. Popularity doesn't make it right.
If total honesty wasn't politically effective, you'd be right. But it is--and we're talking politics, not legislators, so the chaotic methods used to reach consensus in Congress are a different matter entirely, with a different audience and a different set of rules than the court of public opinion in which the NRA operates.
I will admit that I was a bit harsh in my condemnation of the tactic. Christanity doens't divide the world into "Good things" and "sin." There's "godly acts", "sin", and "stuff that's just normal."