One of the things that goes into our own perception of risk is the amount of control we have over the situation. When we're driving, if we want to feel safer, we simply start checking our mirrors and being more alert. We can check the tires and the machinery ourselves to make sure everything is running smoothly. Even if we don't know what we're looking for, it still reassures us.
On a plane, we have absolutely no control over our fates. The piloting, the safety checks, the baggage screening... all done by someone else. So even though we are really safer in the airplane, people get jittery.
This is why I'm absolutely sure that, if cars started driving themselves, they would need to have a far lower accident/fatality rate than people do before anyone will use them.
Indeed, skepticism abounds today, for I cannot believe that you wrote what you did.
There are these wonderful things called "statistics" and arguments like yours are designed solely for the purpose of keeping people irrational and avoiding thinking about them.
The basic thrust of your argument (and I'm hoping that thrust was unintentional) is that, so long as there is a one in six billion chance of being the victim of a violent crime, we as a society are responsible for taking whatever measures are necessary to alleviate that risk.
Let's pull a number out of the air and say that the U.S. spends $100B for state and federal law enforcement every year. Let's also imagine that each time we double that number, we halve the crime rate. Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend $400B to reduce the rate to 1/4, or $800B to get it down to 1/8th the current level. But what about 1/256th? That would cost $25T, which would mean that pretty much the entire economy would be channeled into crime prevention. Forget other wonderful things like medical research, we might not even be able to feed ourselves. And still, people are getting killed, raped, stabbed, and shot.
Nothing in the previous analysis even mentions the secondary costs that come with living in a de facto police state.
I think you're going out of your way to be insulted. When the grandparent says crime is "low enough," he doesn't mean that we just don't give a crap about the victims who remain. He means that the costs associated with getting it down further are unjustifiable. Going back to my earlier example, imagine if we halved the current law enforcement funding. Assume that caused the crime rate to double. Would that be a bad thing? Certainly. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it might be the best thing to do, if funneling that money into medical research lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life.
I could sit here and make precisely the same arguments you do, but in favor of such medical research. After all, for the parents of a child who died of cancer, there is no way the cancer rate was "low enough." But how big a tax increase would we allow to reduce it further than we already have? Would we allow the government to step in and start outlawing certain foods, or require that every citizen take an anti-oxidant tablet every morning? Would we sit by while those who refused the pills were jailed?
The whole idea is that we allocate things like resources and government regulations where they will produce the most good. Simple economics.
I'm not sure I accept your comparison with the "Liberal Democrats." In this case, both "liberal" and "democrat" have very narrowly defined definitions to compare the party platform against. This case is much like the brazenly named "Democratic Republic of the Congo", which doesn't appear to have had a peaceful government change in the last thirty years.
But when it comes to "Christianity," it's very hard to specify the definition without excluding large groups which traditionally have been considered Christians. For example, many mainline Christian denominations try to keep Mormons from labelling themselves Christians because the latter don't accept the Nicean Creed. But neither did any of the Christians who lived before the creed was written. I've also seen protestants who define Christianity in such a way as to exclude Catholics.
Rather than trying to define Christianity in an objective and precise way that fails to map onto the problem set, or a totally subjective way that varies from person to person ("Christians are those whom God will judge worthy in the afterlife"), it's easiest just to accept any and all claimants to the title, and then start evaluating particular positions within Christianity based on whether you find their ideals and teachings to be ennobling or degrading.
I would agree that the Inquisition doesn't capture anything of the nobler side of Christianity, and that the actions of the inquisitionists say more about the problems of giving any one group too much control than about the value of Christianity itself. But I do think that they have to be taken into account in any serious attempt to understand the "essence" of Christianity, just as the critics of Christianity would be unfair in evaluating the faith without examining its more ennobling aspects.
Many of the practices of the Inquisition were obviously motivated more by greed than by any true feeling of religious devotion. For example, it was a common practice for the suspects of the Inquisition to pay the (often extravagant) living costs of the inquisitionists. But it's not a fair evaluation of history to say that every Christian who violated the best principles of the faith were acting according to a "secret agenda." For many of the worst offenders, the protection of their concept of Christianity was the agenda.
It's just as easy to dismiss all the abuses of Communism as the betrayal of Marxist principles by leaders with a secret agenda. To some extent it might even be true, but the abuses cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the question of whether Marxism is a good idea.
Who cares about the Baha'i? They screw up broad definitions of any religion, because they tend to accept any and all spiritual leaders as prophets of their own faith. For example, if I were to define a Mormon as someone who believes that Jesus was the Son of God and that Joseph Smith was his prophet, the Baha'i would be in that definition as well. As far as religious definitions go, I consider them a mere technicality, and not one worth pursuing. Whole different situation from your "Catholic" example.
I'm not sure what the babtist faith is. Google only brought up naked women and alternate spellings of "Baptist". I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Baptists don't accept Mohammed as a prophet of God.
Until you can find a more substantial example of non-Muslims who accept Mohammed as a prophet, I'm standing by my definition.
Now, who defines which specific teachings and doctrines a person must adhere to before they are considered a member of the faith? With churches that have a well-defined heirarchial organization (Catholicism for example) the answer is clearer: A person is an adherent to that faith if they believe the things that the person at the top says they should. If the Pope says person X is in breach of the fundamental doctrines of the faith, then they are.
If the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says excommunicates a person, then they are no longer members of that faith. On the other hand, the term "Mormon" is broader, as it encompasses dozens of splinter sects. Some are polygamous fundamentalists, others (like the RLDS) are virtually indistinguishable from liberal Christians.
While every one of these splinter groups would love to keep the name "Mormon" for themselves (even the LDS Church, which has begged the media to stop using the term, to no avail), it cannot happen. It doesn't matter which is "the true church" or which Joseph Smith would be happiest with, none of them have the ability to excommunicate any of the others from "Mormonism," because the term is defined only by those principles shared by all factions commonly considered "Mormons": Belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet and the Book of Mormon as scripture.
A similar situation exists in Islam. The Sunni and the Shi'ites are both branches of the faith. Neither has any control over the other, neither has a strict organizational structure, and neither group can claim the right to define their beliefs and teachings as "Islam." There may also be other branches I'm not aware of.
The point is, in order for your definition to work, there has to be some group or organization which demands adherence to certain teachings. If I run a church called the "Holy Fellowship Church (1300 S. and Sunset, behind Jerry's Bait Shop)" I can set myself up as the guy who decides who is a member of the Holy Fellowship Church. I can even claim that no person not a member of HFC is a "true Christian." But this puts the rest of Christianity under no obligation to accept my definition. And if the rest of Christianity denounces my ministry as an abomination, that puts me under no obligation to stop calling it a Christian ministry.
Maybe the Bible and Koran would help to solve the question of what constitutes "True Christianity" or "True Islam." But both are often maddeningly vague and give at least the appearance of self-contradiction. While some readings of these books are more justifiable than others, there is still plenty of room for interpretation. Furthermore, in the case of the Bible, you can get even more traction by criticizing the process by which the books of the Bible were selected, and therefore add and remove early books as you please. You could even reject the Bible outright, and by maintaining a belief in the divinity of Jesus you would still maintain at least a small claim on the title "Christian."
It is therefore foolish to try and compile anything but a very short, very general list of attributes for such labels
A small digression: What is it that makes Osama bin Ladin anything but a "real Muslim?" or the Inquisitionists "real Christians?" Dismissing their claims of religious conviction just because we find their behaviors reprehensible smacks of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.
If someone sincerely believes that there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet, that is enough to make him a Muslim. Though he is a painful embarassment to many of the noble people who ascribe to the same beliefs, we cannot dismiss him from the ranks of believers in Islam except on rational grounds. The only way to remove bin Laden and the Inquisitionists from their respective pools is to assume that religious devotion can only have positive effects on devotees. Such an assumption will make any debate over the value of religious conviction impossible.
I never said, or even implied, that I was in favor of abolishing the free market. You, on the other hand, have made it very clear that you do not believe that the market can ever, even in principle, make incorrect decisions.
You claim the oil market is impartial and fair. In fact, it's thoroughly the opposite. Say that an oil reserve is found, and a great deal of it is underneath land you own. It may even be that none of the drilling has to happen on your land. You've just become a multimillionaire, but what exactly did you do to "earn" it? Not a thing. Yet your newfound wealth has just put you in charge of determining the proper disposition of vast resources.
I'm willing to live with these sorts of inequities, but it's stupid to consider these whims of fortune their own moral justification.
There is a second half to your argument: that capitalism inherently directs resources towards their most proper and beneficial use. To which I respond: The.com bust. Hundreds of billions of dollars were funnelled into companies with vague ambitions, non-existent business plans, and glorified pump-n-dump schemes. Millions of people flowed into the field, with all the training costs associated with that mass movement. A great many of them flowed right back out a couple of years later.
This is just one of a myriad of examples that utterly demolishes your foolish notion that lassiez-faire capitalism is a perfect allocator of resources. So why would you assume that burning up all our oil for energy over the next fifty to one hundred years is a good idea, when it's not clear how easy it will be to switch to other sources for plastics and fertilizer?
You're totally missing my point about resources and mind. Example: In February 2001, the Taliban ordered the destruction of several 3000 year old buddhist statues, because they didn't conform to the Taliban's ideas about Islamic law. We're talking about invaluable historical and cultural artifacts. But to the Taliban, they were abominations, so down they went.
Not every mind on the planet placed the same value on these statues. The value of the warm fuzzy feeling a few religious fanatics received from the removal of the statues is a mere drop in the bucket compared to their value to the rest of us. Yet, through sheer accident of ownership, the Taliban enriched themselves by pissing that value away.
Resources mean different things to different people. One person might look at a canyon and see a precious ecosystem, while the other sees a nice place for a hydroelectric dam. Solving the conflict based entirely on the property rights of the various claimants ensures only that the owner will get what he values most. So the government interferes with lassiez-faire capitalism, requiring environmental impact surveys, and accepting or rejecting the proposed dam based on the results.
To me, this seems far saner than, "Well, I own this canyon, and I'll get rich, so up it goes!"
When it is cheaper to pour waste into the river because your company won't have to absorb all the costs of the cancers and birth defects of the people downriver, something has to remedy the inequality. Right now, we've chosen methods like government regulation and tort law. I'm open to whatever other method you might care to suggest, but simply letting each property owner do what he perceives to be in his best interest leads to suboptimal results for everyone.
I'm going to skip over your claim that "The only organizations that constantly overconsum are governments" until such a time as you clarify what you mean, and give some rationale for what sounds like an ignorant statement of faith by a worshipper of the free market.
Last example, relating to your claim that "true overconsumption is not possible." Say I have a dog. I need to go on vacation for a week, and I'm a truly stupid owner. Rather than pay someone to feed and take care of the dog, I just figure out the d
Instead, call nuclear power "Freedom joules." Er, wait, that's metric. That simply won't do. Freedom calories? No, you get those from eating Freedom Fries.
Freedom BTUs? Wait, Britain is our ally, but we shouldn't show too much appreciation. Meh, let's just stick with "Freedom energy."
Getting energy from the sun? Idiot. The cost of launching all those oil rigs into space, sending them to the sun, drilling it, then shipping the oil back (The Sun is massive, so launching from its surface requires a great deal of energy), is simply prohibitively expensive.
Plus, the working conditions on the Sun are extremely hazardous. It would take billions of dollars in research just to come up with fireproof socks.
Energy from the sun. Sheesh. Who lets these people post?
The difference is, there are a wide variety of ways to create energy. But creating plastics efficiently pretty much demands hydrocarbons. So it's not a matter of "who gets to decide." Energy is vital, but it can be generated without using oil. Plastics are vital, but they absolutely require oil.
And what is this nonsense you spout in your earlier post? You're basically saying, "the mind creates meaning, so every decision made by a mind is as good as any other." Just because we are the only thing in the solar system to find oil useful doesn't mean that torching it all in a wasteful, hundred year orgy of consumption is a good idea.
It's like saying, "Well, I've got $14K in the bank. Not enough for a house, and I already have a car. I guess I should spend it on corn dogs." Smart people use their resources wisely, and plan their lives in such a way that they don't use them faster than they can come in.
When one large organization (govt, for example) lies and distorts, and nobody questions them, people sit back and accept the lies and distortions.
When the same organization lies and distorts, and is met by contrary lies and distortions, people wake up and start looking at the issues. The organization has to refine their distortions, taking the contrary information into account. Now, both sides could continue heaping ridiculous slanders upon each other until everyone collapses in a cynical heap. But more likely, the process forces everyone closer to the truth.
It's especially helpful that Moore cultivates a "just a guy" persona. I don't believe he has any professional credentials. He's very up front about the fact that he is not a conduit for perfect information, and that his opinions need to be questioned and scrutinized.
That's one of the things that bug me about the current administration: their demand for unquestioning trust and belief in their plans, their refusal to evaluate evidence that runs contrary to their agenda, and their overall lack of self-introspection. Kerry has been accused of flip-flopping, but right now I would feel much safer if the person at the nation's helm had a demonstrated ability to change his mind.
Actually, if you've watched enough episodes of '24', it indicates that Americans are willing to accept the idea of very brutal torture when the ends justify the means.
Of course, they never depict Jack Bauer taking pleasure from the torture, and it is always done with an eye towards averting some serious catastrophe directed against innocents.
I just don't see the same forces at work in the Iraq situation. Instead, it is characterized by sadism and pointlessness. Aside from that minor quibble, your post makes mad sense.
Regarding the Vietnam photo, I heard somewhere that the reason the man was summarily executed was because he was a Viet Cong officer disguised as a civilian. As painful as it is to see, it is an impossible thing in war to avoid civilian casualties when your enemy is hiding among them. Therefore I feel--and the Geneva Convention seems to agree--that it is a reprehensible thing for a military fighter to go disguised as a civilian in a war zone. It's basically using innocent people as human shields.
Frankly, I've seen professors' handwritten lecture notes, and 90% of them add nothing to the educational process. Certainly not more than a quick note saying, "Read sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.4, paying special attention to least-squares curve fitting and finding orthonormal bases." They're generally disorganized and difficult to follow because they usually take a lot of material for granted when they write.
The mere fact that it's handwritten means that it's basically a rough draft that was hastily flung together. Send them back to him, and have him type them in and rework them until he figures they're worth recycling for next semester. The prof will save time in the long run, and the students will have something nice, clean, and organized to peruse.
Show me one place in Franken's book where he claims, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, to be an unbiased political commentator. Show me one place where the grandparent claims Franken to be such.......
I'm waiting....
Fact is, you won't find one. Franken is refreshingly honest when compared with, "Fair and Balanced! We Report, You Decide!"
Now, if you don't grasp the fact that even people with agendas which disagree with your own might be sources of factual information, there's nothing I can do to help you. Otherwise, why not pick up the book and read what Franken actually says regarding Alan Colmes? Or are you afraid of getting liberal cooties?
Heh heh. My cousin was playing around on my parents' laptop. After a while, she got all frustrated. "Why don't you have a popup blocker?" and spent the next few minutes lecturing me on the importance of always installing Google Toolbar.
I tried to explain the whole Mozilla thing, I really did.
Don't even stuff all of Firebird in there. Just the Gecko rendering engine. I would hate to have to be browsing along and suddenly have a page that opens another location bar, another forward/back/home button set, etc. Just display the page natively, inside a little box that explains just what's going on.
Er, what's so hypocritical about not wanting to write the same site two different ways just to satisfy the whims of an unrepentantly standards-breaking browser that is holding back the entire web, and will continue to do so for years?
This hypothetical plugin doesn't track your surfing habits, doesn't deluge you with popups, doesn't do anything other than render web pages the way the authors intended them to be seen. If someone wants to deliver content using Flash, that's their decision. If someone wants to deliver content via CSS 2.0 without having to work around IE's crappy selector support, that is also their decision.
Yeah, I would have to give Opera a slight edge in speed, even over Firefox. At least that was true for the 6.0 version. I never tried 7.
Now, if the actual executable size is smaller, then that may significantly improve load time. But you also have to take into account which programs are loading how many plugins by default, etc. Even with load times, other factors come into play, like what sort of self-tests the software runs, the order in which things get loaded, etc.
Again, my major point was simply that executable size only determines the minimum amount of memory that a program might use, and there is no real upper bound.
Heh. The Salt Lake and Provo LUGs should get together and start a deathwatch. Basically, people would take turns outside their corporate offices, manning a sign that says, "I bid $5." Victory comes when Darl comes out and accepts the offer.
Re:Why not make it a main browser?
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Doubtful. Here's an analogy that seems to work for me:
Mozilla: A nine course Thanksgiving dinner, with all the trimmings, served on fine china, with everything covered in gravy down to the tablecloth.
Firefox: A good, sturdy pot roast and some steamed vegetables. Fulfills all your nutritional requirements while being quick, easy, and economical. Who wants all the overhead of Thanksgiving just to get a light snack?
Minimo: Trail mix and bottled water. Great for when you're out and about, but lacking certain features that would be sorely missed if it became your only source of nutrition.
Or try this one:
Say you've got a guy who is 40kg overweight. That's Mozilla. Doesn't get around so good. Now starve him a while to make him lose that weight. He gets around much better, doesn't get winded when shooting hoops, and has a much higher quality of life. That's the difference between Mozilla and Firefox: they got rid of the bloat, streamlined it, etc.
Now make him keep losing weight. Another 40kg. But this time it's not squishy fat he's losing. Some of it is muscle. He no longer has the energy to do everything he used to, and may in fact be far worse off than he was when he was 40kg overweight. The only upside is that he's now able to survive in a low-resource environment that would have killed his larger selves.
I guess I could have just said, "Firefox is cutting bloat, Minimo has to cut features," but then what would I have done with the last twenty minutes? Like I said, it all comes down to whether you care about those features or not.
Re:Isn't 64M still too big?
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Just out of curiosity, I fired up Lynx, and it's only using 3KB of memory. So if the only goal is to make a browser that's quick and functional, they're seriously overkilling it.
But that's not the goal here. Look at all the stuff Lynx isn't doing. I'm not sure it even does tables properly.
My impression is that the goal is to take a mostly standards-compliant browser and make it suitable for handhelds, without sacrificing that compliance. Consider all the standards that involves, none of which existed in the early browsers you mentioned: CSS, Javascript, XML, DHTML, the list goes on. Further, I'm guessing they'll want to try and keep the user experience as similar as possible, which means keeping things like graphics display, popup blocking, plugins, XUL, etc.
Also consider the fact that handhelds are surfing the same Moore's Law as desktops. The RAM just keeps on coming. The trend that made this project inconceivable two years ago, and possible today, will make it almost a non-issue a few years down the road.
Re:Why not make it a main browser?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Considering that the whole thing is being wrapped up in a GTK component, it sounds like we can expect Minimo to work on regular desktops as well. The question, then, is whether you're more interested in speed and simplicity or features and flexibility.
Chances are, most desktop users are going to prefer the latter. But if you're trying to cobble together some older hardware, it might be an option for you. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a distro targeted specifically towards older machines? You know, lots of legacy hardware support, smaller window managers like FVWM and Fluxbox.
I love to break it to people when they just don't get it.
Firefox is only about an 8 MB download, and Mozilla is around 12-16. Sure, they're both bigger than Opera, but the size of the executable says nothing about how much memory it will use while running.
Okay, say you have a program that, when run, calculates the digits of pi. The program itself may be only a few tens of kilobytes, but it may allocate fifty megs or so as a holding area for calculations.
Or, an even more basic example:
while( true ) {
fork(); }
Compile it, and the executable is tiny. Run it, and it will quickly eat every bit of RAM in sight. With the loading of files, creating of data structures, caching of results, etc., it's unusual to find a program that doesn't use significantly more memory than is required to fit the executable alone.
Please, smoke less crack and get your act together.
1) I did not claim that Dennis Ritchie wrote BCPL. I claimed he wrote "the compiler for" BCPL.
2) I was overreaching when I made the statement. In his online biography, Ritchie wrote, "I helped with a compiler for the BCPL language on the Multics machine (GE 645) and on the GE 635 under the GECOS system." source
So essentially I was in error. Which brings me to point 3:
3) After claiming that the Freemasons were secretly controlling the compiler market, that Linus wrote Linux using a photocopier, and that the "how do you compile the compiler" question can only be solved by time travel, why would you jump on me for THIS error?
Of the people with the 80 highest scores, five were among the Sept. 11 hijackers, Seisint's presentation said. Forty-five were identified as being or possibly being under existing investigations, while 30 others "were unknown to FBI."
On the one hand, this seems to be a gross invasion of privacy, but on the other hand, I want those other thirty people put under the microscope.
It doesn't sound like the FBI immediately ran out and packed the people on the list off to Guantanamo. The database was used to look for patterns of suspicious behavior, and then the feds sat down and looked at the evidence that caused their scores to be ratcheted up.
I'm not a believer in strong privacy protections. Instead, I believe in transparency. It's getting impossible to stop the flow of information, and much of that information is about us: our lives, our tastes and proclivities, our goals. This data is going to be warehoused, mined, and used by people who don't have our interests at heart. I believe that the only choice we really have is whether to demand it to be done in an open, transparent way, or simply outlaw the whole shebang and watch as it continues under a cloak of secrecy.
If we are all to be watched, then those who wield power should be watched closest of anyone. Applied to the MATRIX system, it might be allowed to continue, but with every search being logged and opened to public scrutiny after some reasonable length of time. Any person arrested due to a tip from the MATRIX system would have to be notified of the fact, and the nature of the evidence against him. Obviously, there are other needed safeguards I haven't considered, but the point is that they would make it harder for the government officials to use the tool to conduct secret vendettas, and give us all the opportunity to determine just how effective the system really is.
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One of the things that goes into our own perception of risk is the amount of control we have over the situation. When we're driving, if we want to feel safer, we simply start checking our mirrors and being more alert. We can check the tires and the machinery ourselves to make sure everything is running smoothly. Even if we don't know what we're looking for, it still reassures us.
On a plane, we have absolutely no control over our fates. The piloting, the safety checks, the baggage screening... all done by someone else. So even though we are really safer in the airplane, people get jittery.
This is why I'm absolutely sure that, if cars started driving themselves, they would need to have a far lower accident/fatality rate than people do before anyone will use them.
Indeed, skepticism abounds today, for I cannot believe that you wrote what you did.
There are these wonderful things called "statistics" and arguments like yours are designed solely for the purpose of keeping people irrational and avoiding thinking about them.
The basic thrust of your argument (and I'm hoping that thrust was unintentional) is that, so long as there is a one in six billion chance of being the victim of a violent crime, we as a society are responsible for taking whatever measures are necessary to alleviate that risk.
Let's pull a number out of the air and say that the U.S. spends $100B for state and federal law enforcement every year. Let's also imagine that each time we double that number, we halve the crime rate. Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend $400B to reduce the rate to 1/4, or $800B to get it down to 1/8th the current level. But what about 1/256th? That would cost $25T, which would mean that pretty much the entire economy would be channeled into crime prevention. Forget other wonderful things like medical research, we might not even be able to feed ourselves. And still, people are getting killed, raped, stabbed, and shot.
Nothing in the previous analysis even mentions the secondary costs that come with living in a de facto police state.
I think you're going out of your way to be insulted. When the grandparent says crime is "low enough," he doesn't mean that we just don't give a crap about the victims who remain. He means that the costs associated with getting it down further are unjustifiable. Going back to my earlier example, imagine if we halved the current law enforcement funding. Assume that caused the crime rate to double. Would that be a bad thing? Certainly. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it might be the best thing to do, if funneling that money into medical research lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life.
I could sit here and make precisely the same arguments you do, but in favor of such medical research. After all, for the parents of a child who died of cancer, there is no way the cancer rate was "low enough." But how big a tax increase would we allow to reduce it further than we already have? Would we allow the government to step in and start outlawing certain foods, or require that every citizen take an anti-oxidant tablet every morning? Would we sit by while those who refused the pills were jailed?
The whole idea is that we allocate things like resources and government regulations where they will produce the most good. Simple economics.
I'm not sure I accept your comparison with the "Liberal Democrats." In this case, both "liberal" and "democrat" have very narrowly defined definitions to compare the party platform against. This case is much like the brazenly named "Democratic Republic of the Congo", which doesn't appear to have had a peaceful government change in the last thirty years.
But when it comes to "Christianity," it's very hard to specify the definition without excluding large groups which traditionally have been considered Christians. For example, many mainline Christian denominations try to keep Mormons from labelling themselves Christians because the latter don't accept the Nicean Creed. But neither did any of the Christians who lived before the creed was written. I've also seen protestants who define Christianity in such a way as to exclude Catholics.
Rather than trying to define Christianity in an objective and precise way that fails to map onto the problem set, or a totally subjective way that varies from person to person ("Christians are those whom God will judge worthy in the afterlife"), it's easiest just to accept any and all claimants to the title, and then start evaluating particular positions within Christianity based on whether you find their ideals and teachings to be ennobling or degrading.
I would agree that the Inquisition doesn't capture anything of the nobler side of Christianity, and that the actions of the inquisitionists say more about the problems of giving any one group too much control than about the value of Christianity itself. But I do think that they have to be taken into account in any serious attempt to understand the "essence" of Christianity, just as the critics of Christianity would be unfair in evaluating the faith without examining its more ennobling aspects.
Many of the practices of the Inquisition were obviously motivated more by greed than by any true feeling of religious devotion. For example, it was a common practice for the suspects of the Inquisition to pay the (often extravagant) living costs of the inquisitionists. But it's not a fair evaluation of history to say that every Christian who violated the best principles of the faith were acting according to a "secret agenda." For many of the worst offenders, the protection of their concept of Christianity was the agenda.
It's just as easy to dismiss all the abuses of Communism as the betrayal of Marxist principles by leaders with a secret agenda. To some extent it might even be true, but the abuses cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the question of whether Marxism is a good idea.
Keep it coming. You gave me a lot to think about.
Who cares about the Baha'i? They screw up broad definitions of any religion, because they tend to accept any and all spiritual leaders as prophets of their own faith. For example, if I were to define a Mormon as someone who believes that Jesus was the Son of God and that Joseph Smith was his prophet, the Baha'i would be in that definition as well. As far as religious definitions go, I consider them a mere technicality, and not one worth pursuing. Whole different situation from your "Catholic" example.
I'm not sure what the babtist faith is. Google only brought up naked women and alternate spellings of "Baptist". I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Baptists don't accept Mohammed as a prophet of God.
Until you can find a more substantial example of non-Muslims who accept Mohammed as a prophet, I'm standing by my definition.
Now, who defines which specific teachings and doctrines a person must adhere to before they are considered a member of the faith? With churches that have a well-defined heirarchial organization (Catholicism for example) the answer is clearer: A person is an adherent to that faith if they believe the things that the person at the top says they should. If the Pope says person X is in breach of the fundamental doctrines of the faith, then they are.
If the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says excommunicates a person, then they are no longer members of that faith. On the other hand, the term "Mormon" is broader, as it encompasses dozens of splinter sects. Some are polygamous fundamentalists, others (like the RLDS) are virtually indistinguishable from liberal Christians.
While every one of these splinter groups would love to keep the name "Mormon" for themselves (even the LDS Church, which has begged the media to stop using the term, to no avail), it cannot happen. It doesn't matter which is "the true church" or which Joseph Smith would be happiest with, none of them have the ability to excommunicate any of the others from "Mormonism," because the term is defined only by those principles shared by all factions commonly considered "Mormons": Belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet and the Book of Mormon as scripture.
A similar situation exists in Islam. The Sunni and the Shi'ites are both branches of the faith. Neither has any control over the other, neither has a strict organizational structure, and neither group can claim the right to define their beliefs and teachings as "Islam." There may also be other branches I'm not aware of.
The point is, in order for your definition to work, there has to be some group or organization which demands adherence to certain teachings. If I run a church called the "Holy Fellowship Church (1300 S. and Sunset, behind Jerry's Bait Shop)" I can set myself up as the guy who decides who is a member of the Holy Fellowship Church. I can even claim that no person not a member of HFC is a "true Christian." But this puts the rest of Christianity under no obligation to accept my definition. And if the rest of Christianity denounces my ministry as an abomination, that puts me under no obligation to stop calling it a Christian ministry.
Maybe the Bible and Koran would help to solve the question of what constitutes "True Christianity" or "True Islam." But both are often maddeningly vague and give at least the appearance of self-contradiction. While some readings of these books are more justifiable than others, there is still plenty of room for interpretation. Furthermore, in the case of the Bible, you can get even more traction by criticizing the process by which the books of the Bible were selected, and therefore add and remove early books as you please. You could even reject the Bible outright, and by maintaining a belief in the divinity of Jesus you would still maintain at least a small claim on the title "Christian."
It is therefore foolish to try and compile anything but a very short, very general list of attributes for such labels
A small digression: What is it that makes Osama bin Ladin anything but a "real Muslim?" or the Inquisitionists "real Christians?" Dismissing their claims of religious conviction just because we find their behaviors reprehensible smacks of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.
If someone sincerely believes that there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet, that is enough to make him a Muslim. Though he is a painful embarassment to many of the noble people who ascribe to the same beliefs, we cannot dismiss him from the ranks of believers in Islam except on rational grounds. The only way to remove bin Laden and the Inquisitionists from their respective pools is to assume that religious devotion can only have positive effects on devotees. Such an assumption will make any debate over the value of religious conviction impossible.
I never said, or even implied, that I was in favor of abolishing the free market. You, on the other hand, have made it very clear that you do not believe that the market can ever, even in principle, make incorrect decisions.
.com bust. Hundreds of billions of dollars were funnelled into companies with vague ambitions, non-existent business plans, and glorified pump-n-dump schemes. Millions of people flowed into the field, with all the training costs associated with that mass movement. A great many of them flowed right back out a couple of years later.
You claim the oil market is impartial and fair. In fact, it's thoroughly the opposite. Say that an oil reserve is found, and a great deal of it is underneath land you own. It may even be that none of the drilling has to happen on your land. You've just become a multimillionaire, but what exactly did you do to "earn" it? Not a thing. Yet your newfound wealth has just put you in charge of determining the proper disposition of vast resources.
I'm willing to live with these sorts of inequities, but it's stupid to consider these whims of fortune their own moral justification.
There is a second half to your argument: that capitalism inherently directs resources towards their most proper and beneficial use. To which I respond: The
This is just one of a myriad of examples that utterly demolishes your foolish notion that lassiez-faire capitalism is a perfect allocator of resources. So why would you assume that burning up all our oil for energy over the next fifty to one hundred years is a good idea, when it's not clear how easy it will be to switch to other sources for plastics and fertilizer?
You're totally missing my point about resources and mind. Example: In February 2001, the Taliban ordered the destruction of several 3000 year old buddhist statues, because they didn't conform to the Taliban's ideas about Islamic law. We're talking about invaluable historical and cultural artifacts. But to the Taliban, they were abominations, so down they went.
Not every mind on the planet placed the same value on these statues. The value of the warm fuzzy feeling a few religious fanatics received from the removal of the statues is a mere drop in the bucket compared to their value to the rest of us. Yet, through sheer accident of ownership, the Taliban enriched themselves by pissing that value away.
Resources mean different things to different people. One person might look at a canyon and see a precious ecosystem, while the other sees a nice place for a hydroelectric dam. Solving the conflict based entirely on the property rights of the various claimants ensures only that the owner will get what he values most. So the government interferes with lassiez-faire capitalism, requiring environmental impact surveys, and accepting or rejecting the proposed dam based on the results.
To me, this seems far saner than, "Well, I own this canyon, and I'll get rich, so up it goes!"
When it is cheaper to pour waste into the river because your company won't have to absorb all the costs of the cancers and birth defects of the people downriver, something has to remedy the inequality. Right now, we've chosen methods like government regulation and tort law. I'm open to whatever other method you might care to suggest, but simply letting each property owner do what he perceives to be in his best interest leads to suboptimal results for everyone.
I'm going to skip over your claim that "The only organizations that constantly overconsum are governments" until such a time as you clarify what you mean, and give some rationale for what sounds like an ignorant statement of faith by a worshipper of the free market.
Last example, relating to your claim that "true overconsumption is not possible." Say I have a dog. I need to go on vacation for a week, and I'm a truly stupid owner. Rather than pay someone to feed and take care of the dog, I just figure out the d
Don't bring up the France/nuclear connection.
Instead, call nuclear power "Freedom joules." Er, wait, that's metric. That simply won't do. Freedom calories? No, you get those from eating Freedom Fries.
Freedom BTUs? Wait, Britain is our ally, but we shouldn't show too much appreciation. Meh, let's just stick with "Freedom energy."
Getting energy from the sun? Idiot. The cost of launching all those oil rigs into space, sending them to the sun, drilling it, then shipping the oil back (The Sun is massive, so launching from its surface requires a great deal of energy), is simply prohibitively expensive.
Plus, the working conditions on the Sun are extremely hazardous. It would take billions of dollars in research just to come up with fireproof socks.
Energy from the sun. Sheesh. Who lets these people post?
The difference is, there are a wide variety of ways to create energy. But creating plastics efficiently pretty much demands hydrocarbons. So it's not a matter of "who gets to decide." Energy is vital, but it can be generated without using oil. Plastics are vital, but they absolutely require oil.
And what is this nonsense you spout in your earlier post? You're basically saying, "the mind creates meaning, so every decision made by a mind is as good as any other." Just because we are the only thing in the solar system to find oil useful doesn't mean that torching it all in a wasteful, hundred year orgy of consumption is a good idea.
It's like saying, "Well, I've got $14K in the bank. Not enough for a house, and I already have a car. I guess I should spend it on corn dogs." Smart people use their resources wisely, and plan their lives in such a way that they don't use them faster than they can come in.
Absolutely, it's value added.
When one large organization (govt, for example) lies and distorts, and nobody questions them, people sit back and accept the lies and distortions.
When the same organization lies and distorts, and is met by contrary lies and distortions, people wake up and start looking at the issues. The organization has to refine their distortions, taking the contrary information into account. Now, both sides could continue heaping ridiculous slanders upon each other until everyone collapses in a cynical heap. But more likely, the process forces everyone closer to the truth.
It's especially helpful that Moore cultivates a "just a guy" persona. I don't believe he has any professional credentials. He's very up front about the fact that he is not a conduit for perfect information, and that his opinions need to be questioned and scrutinized.
That's one of the things that bug me about the current administration: their demand for unquestioning trust and belief in their plans, their refusal to evaluate evidence that runs contrary to their agenda, and their overall lack of self-introspection. Kerry has been accused of flip-flopping, but right now I would feel much safer if the person at the nation's helm had a demonstrated ability to change his mind.
Actually, if you've watched enough episodes of '24', it indicates that Americans are willing to accept the idea of very brutal torture when the ends justify the means.
Of course, they never depict Jack Bauer taking pleasure from the torture, and it is always done with an eye towards averting some serious catastrophe directed against innocents.
I just don't see the same forces at work in the Iraq situation. Instead, it is characterized by sadism and pointlessness. Aside from that minor quibble, your post makes mad sense.
Regarding the Vietnam photo, I heard somewhere that the reason the man was summarily executed was because he was a Viet Cong officer disguised as a civilian. As painful as it is to see, it is an impossible thing in war to avoid civilian casualties when your enemy is hiding among them. Therefore I feel--and the Geneva Convention seems to agree--that it is a reprehensible thing for a military fighter to go disguised as a civilian in a war zone. It's basically using innocent people as human shields.
Discuss.
Frankly, I've seen professors' handwritten lecture notes, and 90% of them add nothing to the educational process. Certainly not more than a quick note saying, "Read sections 2.1, 2.2, and 2.4, paying special attention to least-squares curve fitting and finding orthonormal bases." They're generally disorganized and difficult to follow because they usually take a lot of material for granted when they write.
The mere fact that it's handwritten means that it's basically a rough draft that was hastily flung together. Send them back to him, and have him type them in and rework them until he figures they're worth recycling for next semester. The prof will save time in the long run, and the students will have something nice, clean, and organized to peruse.
Show me one place in Franken's book where he claims, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, to be an unbiased political commentator. Show me one place where the grandparent claims Franken to be such. ... ...
...
I'm waiting.
Fact is, you won't find one. Franken is refreshingly honest when compared with, "Fair and Balanced! We Report, You Decide!"
Now, if you don't grasp the fact that even people with agendas which disagree with your own might be sources of factual information, there's nothing I can do to help you. Otherwise, why not pick up the book and read what Franken actually says regarding Alan Colmes? Or are you afraid of getting liberal cooties?
Heh heh. My cousin was playing around on my parents' laptop. After a while, she got all frustrated. "Why don't you have a popup blocker?" and spent the next few minutes lecturing me on the importance of always installing Google Toolbar.
I tried to explain the whole Mozilla thing, I really did.
Don't even stuff all of Firebird in there. Just the Gecko rendering engine. I would hate to have to be browsing along and suddenly have a page that opens another location bar, another forward/back/home button set, etc. Just display the page natively, inside a little box that explains just what's going on.
Er, what's so hypocritical about not wanting to write the same site two different ways just to satisfy the whims of an unrepentantly standards-breaking browser that is holding back the entire web, and will continue to do so for years?
This hypothetical plugin doesn't track your surfing habits, doesn't deluge you with popups, doesn't do anything other than render web pages the way the authors intended them to be seen. If someone wants to deliver content using Flash, that's their decision. If someone wants to deliver content via CSS 2.0 without having to work around IE's crappy selector support, that is also their decision.
Explain again how this is as bad as Gator?
Okay, so I was off by a factor of 1000. My point still stands. :)
God, I've always wanted to say that.
I looked at the output of top again, and if 3K is 1.0% of my total memory, I'm seriously screwed.
Yeah, I would have to give Opera a slight edge in speed, even over Firefox. At least that was true for the 6.0 version. I never tried 7.
Now, if the actual executable size is smaller, then that may significantly improve load time. But you also have to take into account which programs are loading how many plugins by default, etc. Even with load times, other factors come into play, like what sort of self-tests the software runs, the order in which things get loaded, etc.
Again, my major point was simply that executable size only determines the minimum amount of memory that a program might use, and there is no real upper bound.
Heh. The Salt Lake and Provo LUGs should get together and start a deathwatch. Basically, people would take turns outside their corporate offices, manning a sign that says, "I bid $5." Victory comes when Darl comes out and accepts the offer.
Doubtful. Here's an analogy that seems to work for me:
Mozilla: A nine course Thanksgiving dinner, with all the trimmings, served on fine china, with everything covered in gravy down to the tablecloth.
Firefox: A good, sturdy pot roast and some steamed vegetables. Fulfills all your nutritional requirements while being quick, easy, and economical. Who wants all the overhead of Thanksgiving just to get a light snack?
Minimo: Trail mix and bottled water. Great for when you're out and about, but lacking certain features that would be sorely missed if it became your only source of nutrition.
Or try this one:
Say you've got a guy who is 40kg overweight. That's Mozilla. Doesn't get around so good. Now starve him a while to make him lose that weight. He gets around much better, doesn't get winded when shooting hoops, and has a much higher quality of life. That's the difference between Mozilla and Firefox: they got rid of the bloat, streamlined it, etc.
Now make him keep losing weight. Another 40kg. But this time it's not squishy fat he's losing. Some of it is muscle. He no longer has the energy to do everything he used to, and may in fact be far worse off than he was when he was 40kg overweight. The only upside is that he's now able to survive in a low-resource environment that would have killed his larger selves.
I guess I could have just said, "Firefox is cutting bloat, Minimo has to cut features," but then what would I have done with the last twenty minutes? Like I said, it all comes down to whether you care about those features or not.
Just out of curiosity, I fired up Lynx, and it's only using 3KB of memory. So if the only goal is to make a browser that's quick and functional, they're seriously overkilling it.
But that's not the goal here. Look at all the stuff Lynx isn't doing. I'm not sure it even does tables properly.
My impression is that the goal is to take a mostly standards-compliant browser and make it suitable for handhelds, without sacrificing that compliance. Consider all the standards that involves, none of which existed in the early browsers you mentioned: CSS, Javascript, XML, DHTML, the list goes on. Further, I'm guessing they'll want to try and keep the user experience as similar as possible, which means keeping things like graphics display, popup blocking, plugins, XUL, etc.
Also consider the fact that handhelds are surfing the same Moore's Law as desktops. The RAM just keeps on coming. The trend that made this project inconceivable two years ago, and possible today, will make it almost a non-issue a few years down the road.
Considering that the whole thing is being wrapped up in a GTK component, it sounds like we can expect Minimo to work on regular desktops as well. The question, then, is whether you're more interested in speed and simplicity or features and flexibility.
Chances are, most desktop users are going to prefer the latter. But if you're trying to cobble together some older hardware, it might be an option for you. Speaking of which, does anyone know of a distro targeted specifically towards older machines? You know, lots of legacy hardware support, smaller window managers like FVWM and Fluxbox.
I love to break it to people when they just don't get it.
Firefox is only about an 8 MB download, and Mozilla is around 12-16. Sure, they're both bigger than Opera, but the size of the executable says nothing about how much memory it will use while running.
Okay, say you have a program that, when run, calculates the digits of pi. The program itself may be only a few tens of kilobytes, but it may allocate fifty megs or so as a holding area for calculations.
Or, an even more basic example:
while( true )
{
fork();
}
Compile it, and the executable is tiny. Run it, and it will quickly eat every bit of RAM in sight. With the loading of files, creating of data structures, caching of results, etc., it's unusual to find a program that doesn't use significantly more memory than is required to fit the executable alone.
Please, smoke less crack and get your act together.
A few points:
1) I did not claim that Dennis Ritchie wrote BCPL. I claimed he wrote "the compiler for" BCPL.
2) I was overreaching when I made the statement. In his online biography, Ritchie wrote, "I helped with a compiler for the BCPL language on the Multics machine (GE 645) and on the GE 635 under the GECOS system." source
So essentially I was in error. Which brings me to point 3:
3) After claiming that the Freemasons were secretly controlling the compiler market, that Linus wrote Linux using a photocopier, and that the "how do you compile the compiler" question can only be solved by time travel, why would you jump on me for THIS error?
No, really. I want to know.
On the one hand, this seems to be a gross invasion of privacy, but on the other hand, I want those other thirty people put under the microscope.
It doesn't sound like the FBI immediately ran out and packed the people on the list off to Guantanamo. The database was used to look for patterns of suspicious behavior, and then the feds sat down and looked at the evidence that caused their scores to be ratcheted up.
I'm not a believer in strong privacy protections. Instead, I believe in transparency. It's getting impossible to stop the flow of information, and much of that information is about us: our lives, our tastes and proclivities, our goals. This data is going to be warehoused, mined, and used by people who don't have our interests at heart. I believe that the only choice we really have is whether to demand it to be done in an open, transparent way, or simply outlaw the whole shebang and watch as it continues under a cloak of secrecy.
If we are all to be watched, then those who wield power should be watched closest of anyone. Applied to the MATRIX system, it might be allowed to continue, but with every search being logged and opened to public scrutiny after some reasonable length of time. Any person arrested due to a tip from the MATRIX system would have to be notified of the fact, and the nature of the evidence against him. Obviously, there are other needed safeguards I haven't considered, but the point is that they would make it harder for the government officials to use the tool to conduct secret vendettas, and give us all the opportunity to determine just how effective the system really is.