Getting auditors from your back is one thing. Get different auditors. Regulators will not shut down your company as long as you take good care of you financial systems. If you allow any nut-job in your company access to your financial systems, you have to lock down every employee. If you however have locked down your financial systems, no regulator will shut down your company for allowing your (non-financial) employees to read webmail.
And yes, I do work at a SOX regulated company, we're compliant, and I can read web-mail, ssh to the outside world, use POP to different servers and do whatever I need to do to get my job done while still having a (semblance of a) life. I do have to fill in more paperwork than I'd like, and that takes time. But that's the cost of doing business for the USA.
2. A complex, intelligent, powerful creature (presumably with a beard) popped into existence from nothing, then one day decided to create the universe from nothing.
Why must we assume that such a "complex, intelligent, powerful creature" is limited to the same physics as physical objects?
You're driving with considerable velocity down a certain path, with a lot of mud on your front windscreen, allowing only a very poor view of the front. Your eyesight is pretty poor. One of your friends with better vision in the back think he sees a canyon straight ahead, and you're driving straight to it. Several other friends (this is an SUV), also notice this and ask you to turn left. Only one friend claims he doesn't see the canyon. He argues that what everyone sees could just be a gentle slope. Furthermore, he claims that even if there would be a canyon, you might actually be driving on some very thick quicksand, and stopping here might make you sink, in a while. There could also be canyons to the left and right.
He further argues that given these uncertainties, it's better to stay the course, and maybe speed up a little as he's enjoying the ride so much.
So what do you do, keep forcing the system or try to brake?
Nuclear and chemical bombings as are in the scope of a terrorist group (i.e., not a nation) are no more a threat to society than conventional bombings. They are obnoxious, can cause severe number of deaths, but wiping out a small town does not end a society. Biological warfare can, in principle, end a society, but even the nations are not that far to create a threat that is (a) self-propelling (b) slow enough to self-propell and (c) mutable enough to fool the human immune system. You can even make an evolutionary argument that the pure existence of the human race is a clear sign that it's almost impossible to wipe it out through viral means.
O RLY?? BSD has its own set of problems, although less specifically stated as the GPL. Let's focus on binary redistribution of BSD-licensed code.
What it says is:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
...
(2) Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
...
So, if you take a BSD-licensed piece of code and modify the hell out of it, all you have to do is add this license to the distribution, and sell it for any price you want and forget about license issues... or is it? The license gives the receiver of the code the permission to redistribute it, apparently including your own modifications, especially if there is no clean separation between the original code and your modifications. So your clients can redistribute your binaries to whomever they want. There goes your get-rich-quick scheme, and no wonder corporate lawyers are worried.
The big differences between BSD and GPL licenses is that GPL forces distribution of the source, and has more spelled out definitions of linking. BSD is very vague about what is actually covered by this forced copyright notice, especially when it is a binary redistribution, and is therefore legally less clear.
In previous era's the monarch owned the entire country: lands, writings, inventions, whatever you can name. You wouldn't call that capitalism, right? We're now slowly turning into a society where corporations own everything: land, writings, inventions, whatever you can name. And CEO's are their high-priests. Maybe capitalism, but efficient? That has yet to be seen.
Give a corporation monopoly rights on the act of breathing, and soon you'll notice that 90% of the US GDP will come through this corporation. What's missing in the equation is opportunity costs: what amount of money would be made if people could spend their money elsewhere? A tricky question, but one that needs to be addressed.
Very true. And now consider that at some point any technological advanced civilization will find a way to repair their bodies indefinitely. Eternal life would probably be completely antithetical to exponential growth. Having kids around will become a liability, as they probably are after your position in life at some point in time. Eternal life is a completely different playing ground than the mortal life, and it might be necessarily conservative to the point that any form of expansion through colonization is considered lethal and is thus shunned.
So, what's your proposed denomination for protestant, young-earth believing, arc of Noah seeking, Genesis 2 denying, science-corrupting, pork-eating, but otherwise bible-literalists that are mainly spawning in the mid-west of the US? As creationist now suddenly is a synonym for 'religious' (with the exception of Buddhism), how should we refer to this fringe cult that calls itself 'Creationists'? Christian Jihadists perhaps?
There are "jihadis" that are even more rabid in their beliefs, but to say that all Muslims are equally closed minded is just as offensive as your argument. Don't get me wrong, I don't think you mean any disrespect, but stereotyping religions is no different using stereotypes as a basis for racism.
Sorry dude, but the OP isn't stereotyping your religion, Christianity I assume. He's stereotyping the lunatics of Christianity: creationists. Saying creationists are rabid lunatics is equivalent to saying jihadis are. Both are fringe cults that have some *local* support in some backwards communities, but are not representative of their wider religions: Christianity and Islam respectively.
I would think that a thorough treatment of genesis should be mandatory. Genesis 1: God creates all animals, then creates man. Genesis 2: God creates man, then creates all animals. Discuss.
What evidence do you have that evolution on an inter-speacies scale has stopped? We haven't seen much of it the last 100 years, but that's not the correct time-scale. And as for the teacher calling you a foolish sheep, this can easily happen when, after explaining evolution, the age of dinosaur and all that, the stupid student comes up and asks how this can be if the earth is only 4,000 year's old, because some old book says so. Exasperation ensues, and another christian gets dumber.
Sorry, C++ is an ISO standard, and Intel's and gcc's output work reasonably well together on linux. The only thing related to C++ and ECMA that I'm aware of is the C++/CLI bindings 'standard'. Of course, this is a MS only. Or were you referring to C#?
You can do human readable markup without devolving into the bloat of XML. Hell, you can even do human writable markup, something you cannot realistically do with XML. The OP pointed you to such marvels: groff and latex, both decades old. What the OP is complaining about is that we've got a known problem, a good solution, and then the hype of the day thrashes that solution and comes with something that is worse in practically every aspect, and to boot, it needs additional processing stages to be stored efficiently.
And this stuff about gzip being a solution? Try to load the DOM of a 100 MB XML file using less than 1GB of space. The gzipped version is only 1.1 MB, but that's no help: the DOM needs to be build. XML just plainly sucks.
You're assuming here that IQ is related to a selective advantage, then argue why that isn't necessarily the case. So maybe there isn't a strong selective advantage for IQ?
The GP is arguing that ESP would give a very distinct selective advantage, one that would help for all forms of life, probably from bacteria upwards. There doesn't seem to be a downside, hence if it exists, and would not be tied to humans, why hasn't it evolved to obvious levels in all forms of life?
Okay, so if commercial company X tries to obstruct its customer Y for a particular move Q that company Y made it's a sign of reliability, while if an open source foundation does the same, it's unreliable? For instance, substitute X = Sun, Y = Microsoft, Q = breaking Java. In your terminology: Sun threw a tantrum when Microsoft tried to break Java, and where is Java now? The de-facto standard programming language for large business.
Look, although the FSF is not a commercial entity, Novell tries to get around the restrictions the FSF opposes. Just like any other entity it retaliates. Novell has broken agreements, so they will suffer. The message is clear: Free Software, like proprietary software, is not gratis, but comes with obligations. If you don't meet those, you don't get delivered. Normal business.
No, absolutely wrong. You have a myriad of copyright owners in the kernel. I just checked in my source tree, and all code is copyright of the original writers. You're confusing this with the GNU toolchain, which is indeed copyright FSF.
Furthermore, the license is a mix of 'only GPL-2' and 'any later version'. I ran this on my linux source tree:
So on the one side we have Dr. Ian Clark, a geologists from Ottowa, and on the other side we have the entire field of climatology, and you argue that the latter are the activists?
Look, there is a fairly straightforward physical relationship between temperature and CO2 levels. Higher temperature causes some increase in CO2, and higher CO2 levels increase temperature some. If that was all forcing there is, we'd be dead on a Venus like planet right now. There are other forcing factors. Over the timespan that Dr. Ian Clark is studying, many other forcing factors can come into play that are stronger than the causal relationship between CO2 and temperature. For instance, a complete coverage of the atmosphere by clouds can deflect so much sunlight that temperatures will drop significantly, killing plant life. Throw in some massive fires here and there, and CO2 levels will rise, leading to a situation with high CO2 and low temperature. This does not however refute the causal link between the two, it merely shows that there are more than just two forcing factors. Going to the now, we see, maybe for the very first time in history, massive CO2 increase preceding temperature rise. Climatology is studying this, and in the absence of other forcing factors is predicting that this lead to higher temperatures still. Dr. Clark's studies are not relevant for this, as they include all other forcing that has ever occured. We're witnessing a period with a fairly stable set of forcing factors, except for the CO2 level, and lo and behold, temperature is going up.
Okay, let's take the last paragraph and show how logic can actually work without needing factual information, something you seem to be incapable of.
Ultimately, what the "Global Warming" push is about is power. It has become a political point of view, co-opted by socialists and communists who are attempting to force a consensus in the scientific community through control of government and private foundation grant funds. Once they are able to force a consensus and squash all independent thought in the scientific community, they hope to be able to push the government towards socialism and (eventually) all-out communism. While I doubt there is a conspiracy in the classical sense, there are absolutely like-minded groups of people all pushing for similar goals. I, for one, am proud of GW's insistence on real hard science, and not the death of independent thought that the "Consensus Scientists" would bring us.
If the commies are in such a seat of power that they control both government and private scientific funding, then they would not need to be able to push the government into any form of action as they would already be in control of the government. Who do you think controls government funding? Goblins? No, it's the government stupid.
The situation is even worse. Nothing we do at this point will have any effect on climate change for the next 30 to 40 years. We can globally stop emitting CO2 completely, and still we will sea the North pole dissapear, the ice on Greenland largely melt, and more of this fun stuff. The entire idea of Kyoto is to make a first step into coming to an economy that will give us a chance to survive the second half of this century and beyond. Seeing it in this light, it does not matter that much what China and India are doing at this point. Important is that the first world (the ones that have caused the current accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere), makes the first step, as the first world population is not struggling to avoid starvation. Once that step is made, further steps can be taken.
What people like you fail to realize is that the discussion of culling global CO2 levels is not a question of years, it's a question of decades, with results to be measured in half centuries. Primate brains are not wired to oversee such timespans. We should now begin to take baby first steps, develop technology to help and change our destructive way of life for a more sustainable model. Once we get the hang of that, maybe at the cost of not being able to buy that third car or that huge plasma screen, we will force China and India to do the same (carbon-neutrality import tax), and sell them our tech.
With complainers like you, what I see is an obese child that, for his own good, has to surrender a piece of an enormous cake that he is gorging. Now he cries and complains that his starving classmates (all 1000 of them) should surrender a proportional amount of the bit of bread they're using to put some meat on the bone. Very small and petty.
The US still puts out more CO2 in the atmosphere than China, and the cumulative amount of CO2 that the US has put in the atmosphere in the last century will not be reached by China in the next few decades. This will change though, but luckily an international set of treaties and agreements have been formed in the early 21st century that will be able to cull China's pollution when China has reached some position of wealth.
Oh wait, the US killed that. Everyone is fucked. Thanks.
Re:Speaking of statistics
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
I know, but I decided to give my fictitious villains/victims the benefit of the doubt. In any case, given the way that the media jumped on this exit-poll discrepancy, any programmer would have a hard time selling the story before being silenced. The 'not really knowing what it is for' situation would make that even more likely (and save a bunch of cash in the process).
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I do work at a SOX regulated company, we're compliant, and I can read web-mail, ssh to the outside world, use POP to different servers and do whatever I need to do to get my job done while still having a (semblance of a) life. I do have to fill in more paperwork than I'd like, and that takes time. But that's the cost of doing business for the USA.
Because his beard would otherwise get in the way?
So what do you do, keep forcing the system or try to brake?
Nuclear and chemical bombings as are in the scope of a terrorist group (i.e., not a nation) are no more a threat to society than conventional bombings. They are obnoxious, can cause severe number of deaths, but wiping out a small town does not end a society. Biological warfare can, in principle, end a society, but even the nations are not that far to create a threat that is (a) self-propelling (b) slow enough to self-propell and (c) mutable enough to fool the human immune system. You can even make an evolutionary argument that the pure existence of the human race is a clear sign that it's almost impossible to wipe it out through viral means.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
...
(2) Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
...
So, if you take a BSD-licensed piece of code and modify the hell out of it, all you have to do is add this license to the distribution, and sell it for any price you want and forget about license issues ... or is it? The license gives the receiver of the code the permission to redistribute it, apparently including your own modifications, especially if there is no clean separation between the original code and your modifications. So your clients can redistribute your binaries to whomever they want. There goes your get-rich-quick scheme, and no wonder corporate lawyers are worried.
The big differences between BSD and GPL licenses is that GPL forces distribution of the source, and has more spelled out definitions of linking. BSD is very vague about what is actually covered by this forced copyright notice, especially when it is a binary redistribution, and is therefore legally less clear.
Massive changes, no references? Bad academic, no cookie!
In previous era's the monarch owned the entire country: lands, writings, inventions, whatever you can name. You wouldn't call that capitalism, right? We're now slowly turning into a society where corporations own everything: land, writings, inventions, whatever you can name. And CEO's are their high-priests. Maybe capitalism, but efficient? That has yet to be seen.
But, what happened to "Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister"?
Give a corporation monopoly rights on the act of breathing, and soon you'll notice that 90% of the US GDP will come through this corporation. What's missing in the equation is opportunity costs: what amount of money would be made if people could spend their money elsewhere? A tricky question, but one that needs to be addressed.
Very true. And now consider that at some point any technological advanced civilization will find a way to repair their bodies indefinitely. Eternal life would probably be completely antithetical to exponential growth. Having kids around will become a liability, as they probably are after your position in life at some point in time. Eternal life is a completely different playing ground than the mortal life, and it might be necessarily conservative to the point that any form of expansion through colonization is considered lethal and is thus shunned.
So, what's your proposed denomination for protestant, young-earth believing, arc of Noah seeking, Genesis 2 denying, science-corrupting, pork-eating, but otherwise bible-literalists that are mainly spawning in the mid-west of the US? As creationist now suddenly is a synonym for 'religious' (with the exception of Buddhism), how should we refer to this fringe cult that calls itself 'Creationists'? Christian Jihadists perhaps?
Sorry dude, but the OP isn't stereotyping your religion, Christianity I assume. He's stereotyping the lunatics of Christianity: creationists. Saying creationists are rabid lunatics is equivalent to saying jihadis are. Both are fringe cults that have some *local* support in some backwards communities, but are not representative of their wider religions: Christianity and Islam respectively.
ping alpha-centauri.gov 64 bytes from prez.alpha-centauri.gov (63.233.187.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=317683218348ms
Ah, they've arrived. Only 4 years for the holiday snaphots to arrive...
I would think that a thorough treatment of genesis should be mandatory. Genesis 1: God creates all animals, then creates man. Genesis 2: God creates man, then creates all animals. Discuss.
What evidence do you have that evolution on an inter-speacies scale has stopped? We haven't seen much of it the last 100 years, but that's not the correct time-scale. And as for the teacher calling you a foolish sheep, this can easily happen when, after explaining evolution, the age of dinosaur and all that, the stupid student comes up and asks how this can be if the earth is only 4,000 year's old, because some old book says so. Exasperation ensues, and another christian gets dumber.
Sorry, C++ is an ISO standard, and Intel's and gcc's output work reasonably well together on linux. The only thing related to C++ and ECMA that I'm aware of is the C++/CLI bindings 'standard'. Of course, this is a MS only. Or were you referring to C#?
And this stuff about gzip being a solution? Try to load the DOM of a 100 MB XML file using less than 1GB of space. The gzipped version is only 1.1 MB, but that's no help: the DOM needs to be build. XML just plainly sucks.
You're assuming here that IQ is related to a selective advantage, then argue why that isn't necessarily the case. So maybe there isn't a strong selective advantage for IQ? The GP is arguing that ESP would give a very distinct selective advantage, one that would help for all forms of life, probably from bacteria upwards. There doesn't seem to be a downside, hence if it exists, and would not be tied to humans, why hasn't it evolved to obvious levels in all forms of life?
Look, although the FSF is not a commercial entity, Novell tries to get around the restrictions the FSF opposes. Just like any other entity it retaliates. Novell has broken agreements, so they will suffer. The message is clear: Free Software, like proprietary software, is not gratis, but comes with obligations. If you don't meet those, you don't get delivered. Normal business.
Furthermore, the license is a mix of 'only GPL-2' and 'any later version'. I ran this on my linux source tree:
This is significant chunk of the kernel.
Look, there is a fairly straightforward physical relationship between temperature and CO2 levels. Higher temperature causes some increase in CO2, and higher CO2 levels increase temperature some. If that was all forcing there is, we'd be dead on a Venus like planet right now. There are other forcing factors. Over the timespan that Dr. Ian Clark is studying, many other forcing factors can come into play that are stronger than the causal relationship between CO2 and temperature. For instance, a complete coverage of the atmosphere by clouds can deflect so much sunlight that temperatures will drop significantly, killing plant life. Throw in some massive fires here and there, and CO2 levels will rise, leading to a situation with high CO2 and low temperature. This does not however refute the causal link between the two, it merely shows that there are more than just two forcing factors. Going to the now, we see, maybe for the very first time in history, massive CO2 increase preceding temperature rise. Climatology is studying this, and in the absence of other forcing factors is predicting that this lead to higher temperatures still. Dr. Clark's studies are not relevant for this, as they include all other forcing that has ever occured. We're witnessing a period with a fairly stable set of forcing factors, except for the CO2 level, and lo and behold, temperature is going up.
If the commies are in such a seat of power that they control both government and private scientific funding, then they would not need to be able to push the government into any form of action as they would already be in control of the government. Who do you think controls government funding? Goblins? No, it's the government stupid.
What people like you fail to realize is that the discussion of culling global CO2 levels is not a question of years, it's a question of decades, with results to be measured in half centuries. Primate brains are not wired to oversee such timespans. We should now begin to take baby first steps, develop technology to help and change our destructive way of life for a more sustainable model. Once we get the hang of that, maybe at the cost of not being able to buy that third car or that huge plasma screen, we will force China and India to do the same (carbon-neutrality import tax), and sell them our tech.
With complainers like you, what I see is an obese child that, for his own good, has to surrender a piece of an enormous cake that he is gorging. Now he cries and complains that his starving classmates (all 1000 of them) should surrender a proportional amount of the bit of bread they're using to put some meat on the bone. Very small and petty.
Oh wait, the US killed that. Everyone is fucked. Thanks.
I know, but I decided to give my fictitious villains/victims the benefit of the doubt. In any case, given the way that the media jumped on this exit-poll discrepancy, any programmer would have a hard time selling the story before being silenced. The 'not really knowing what it is for' situation would make that even more likely (and save a bunch of cash in the process).