I don't know what you are talking about, but I personally thought the Java applet was ugly, slow, and worst of all unnecessary. What is so wrong with the design that DMOZ already had?
But usually if someone admits guilt, we trust them.
You should also weigh whether or not the confessor has something to gain from claiming to be guilty. When child porn is more desirable than regular porn, as is the case when posting to those newsgroups, then the poster can get trades easier and/or more hits for whatever site they are advertising for. AFAIK, just calling something child porn is not illegal.
You are saying if I rob a bank and then go to the FBI and say "I robbed that bank", that the FBI should just ignore me because they didn't see it happen.
Its more like saying the FBI should check to make sure the guy confessing isn't just someone who is mentally unstable and looking to be famous. Its not a perfect analogy, but its really hard to imagine a situation where you can profit from confessing to a bank robbery.
That was the whole point of the -noads configure script option comment. That way it would just be a superficial commerciality. And I said other OSS projects so they might be able to cook up some kind of advertising trade agreement or something.
That statement wasn't exactly pro-Napster. It was more like Napster is a bad thing, but we shouldn't get rid of altogether because something worse that we won't be able to get rid of will pop up in its stead.
Why don't you just sell some advertising for other open source projects, and add a -noads option to the configure script? Wouldn't selling advertisements qualify you to be a commercial venture?
Well, I obviously didn't know about the National Day of Prayer every year. But that doesn't diminish the argument
Well then dictionary.com is wrong. Dictionarys only record what words are used as, and are very often either out of date or wrong. Strong atheism asserts that there is no god. Atheism as a whole just denies certain beliefs, and as such, has no beliefs.
Life's beginning is arbitrary because the difference between life and non-life is a matter of definition. As there is really no consistent definition of life, then the choice between life begining at conception, and life begining at birth is arbitrary.
WRT your statistics about drug programs, please post some impartial statistics. Statistics about a program coming from a programs own website are not impartial.
Don't make blanket statements. I am an atheist, as well as many of my friends. I do not know a single person that considers narcotics anonymous a religious program.
A separation of church and state implies a separation of god and state. This is because endorsing a god necessarly favors certain religions over certain other religions. And the "so help you God" bit was added in the fifties, the same time they illegally placed "In God We Trust" on our currency and "One nation under God" in the Pledge of Alliegance.
Atheism is not, has never been, and will never be a religion. It is not a belief system. It isn't even a belief! It is, pure a simple, an absence of a certain catagory of beliefs, namely those that involve the existence of one or many gods of any sort. And separation of curch and state guarentees Freedom of Religion to everyone except public officals on duty. Public officials off duty can believe whatever they want to. Public officials on duty are supposed to act as if they don't believe in any one religion.
As for your tax comments, getting all the tax money through a tax on consumption will inevitably produce a recession, if not a depression. It would provide a great incentive to consume less and less, and in a consumer based economy, this is disastrous. And about the flat tax, even if the flat tax scheme you propose takes into account interest and capitol gains (which most of them don't) how has a millionaire EARNED his money from interest? He/she hasn't contributed to production in any way, shape, or form. In essence, interest is the result of using your money to steal money from the people actually producing stuff. And BTW, it is most definately the job of the government (at least the tax code setting portion of it) to decide who can afford to give what. That is the whole point in setting a tax code.
I don't know enough to comment about the tax cuts by JFK, but the economic upturn created by Reagan's tax cuts was a mirage supported by the government's deficit spending. When the deficit finally caught up to Reagan, he was gone and Bush Sr. had to deal with the resulting recession. Plain and simple, trickle down economics and deficit spending doesn't work.
You can make that argument, and that is how information theory uses the term "information". But if you use it that way, you are using the word "information" in a way that is completely counter-intuitive. Because, using that definition, a string of bits or digits that is truely random (i.e. contains a proportional frequency of every possible combination of bits or digits) would have 100% information. An intuitive understanding of information would find this completely false. And I certainly don't see how a random string of digits can be considered useful.
To most people, information is stored in order, not disorder (entropy).
BTW, your black hole example was a very bad one because of Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation reduces the mass of a black hole, and therefore its event horizon, and therefore its entropy without releasing any information about what went into the black hole. Your precious information has just been destroyed.
Separation of church and state is violated by declaring a national day of prayer? This is something which has been done many times in our nation's history with no outcry of violation of church and state.
I've never heard of a single time when any president declared a National Day Of Prayer. A national moment of silence, maybe. But that is something completely different.
This concept was developed by people who wanted to protect the common man from an oppressive national government forcing them to have certain religious beliefs. (eg, what is happening with the religion of atheism today in the PRC.)
First of all, atheism isn't a religion. It is an absence of a belief in a god. Secondly, the "beliefs" of atheism can never be force on you against your will because they don't exist. Atheism has no, I repeat, no beliefs, period. And finally, declaring a national day of prayer is forcing beliefs on me. It is forcing the belief that prayer is anything more than just spiritual masturbation.
There's no debate in the scientific community about when life begins - it's at conception - so Mr. Bush apprently believes in protecting the rights of the unborn child.
There's no debate in the scientific community about when life begins because you can't have a scientific debate about something that is arbitary. The point at which life begins is a matter of definition, and cannot be influenced either way by the scientific method.
Many faith-based programs work where "secular" ones fail. For example the rate of recidivism in drug rehabilitation programs is much lower in faith-based programs than in ones that have no faith component.
Please show some statistics.
People who have historically paid more should get more of a break! It's a precentage thing - and it's fair!
This has been addressed by other replies.
Tell me one case where Mr. Ashcroft has not upheld the law.
He lied under oath in his confirmation hearings. There was also a case while he was still governor where according to a new state law, all money from police seizures had to go to the state fund for education, instead of funding the police departments as it used to. Ashcroft is on record telling the police chief that he would "look the other way" if the law wasn't followed.
Even lossless compression slows down your computer. Did you ever run a "transparent" hard drive compression utility? You know, the kind where all your files are compressed, and whenever you open them it decompresses them on the fly? I'll admit it was quite a while ago that I was using it, but the read/write times were quite a bit slower. Maybe it wouldn't be noticeable nowadays, but it sure was back then.
1) I do know what entropy means. I know that compression and entropy are not explicitly linked, but they are related, and the most efficient algorithms come close to the entropy ratio
No, you obviously don't know what entropy is. In your original post, you claim that in English, there is usually only one bit of entropy for every byte. Then you tried to use this to support a 8:1 compression ratio. This is utter bullshit. An 8:1 compression ratio would mean 7 bits of entropy for every byte. One bit of entropy for every byte would produce at most an 8:7 compression ratio. Entropy is the useless or redundant information. Just like in chemistry, where the term came from. Entropy is all the heat energy that can't be used for work, because it is too random.
Complete and utter bullshit. Fair use includes space-shifting, time-shifting, and media-shifting, as documented in the RIAA vs. Diamond and Sony vs. Universal City Studios.
presumes to go out to Redmond and tell the creator of the operating system used on 90% of the world's computers...
Wait! Who was this reporter talking to? The founder of the Seattle Computer Company (the guy who invented DOS), the researchers at Xerox PARC (the guys who invented what would become Windows), or the programmers at Microsoft (the people that modified the programs that the previously mentioned people wrote to create all the different versions of the Microsoft operating systems)? I may have read the article incorrectly, but I got the impression that the journalist was talking to Bill Gates. The last thing that Bill Gates programmed was BASIC. And even that he just modified (read "pirated") from a PDP-11 program that he used at college.
The only problem with that argument is the fact that this was not their first offense. Their history with forcing Dell to package Office, stealing code outright from other companies, etc. shows that they were arrogantly ignoring the law.
Um, no. Those statements are not libel because they are opinions, not facts. You can write any opinion you want to about any person, you just can't write something factually false, and present it as true.
Don't attack Mr. Bush without foundation - wait until he does something bad before beating him up.
You mean like showing his complete distaste for the separation of church and state by using his first act as president-proper to dedclare the next day a "National Day of Prayer"? Or how about imposing a double standard by removing federal funding to any and all international groups that provide abortions or abortion counseling, but keeping funding for many faith based organizations? Or maybe his sabotage of the federal budget to give the richest 1% of the country a tax break? Or his appointment of an attorney general that has a history of not upholding the law? Just how much bad stuff to you want him to do before we start beating him up?
I admit that Bill Clinton did some things I thought were reprehensible, such as getting us involved in a civil war we had no business in. But Bush has done stuff to rival Clinton's misdeeds, and Clinton had a full 8 years to mess up. Bush has had less than a month. If Bush continues his current course, I sure hope he is impeached before he has a chance to be elected again.
Maybe you should study a little more quantum mechanics, before you go shooting your mouth off about things you obviously know nothing about.
First of all, it was Heisenberg who worked out theory, not Planck. All Planck did was to suggest that maybe electrons could only give out specified amounts of energy.
Secondly, its not "what" and "where" something is, its momentum and position. And the Uncertainty Principle really only applies practically at the sub-atomic level.
You are assuming that greed is a part of human nature. I've never seen any evidence to show that is true. In fact, I've never seen any evidence for the existence of human nature at all.
Exactly; everybody gets what they require, and in turn contributes whatever they're able
No, you don't "get" anything because you already have it. As does everybody else. Neither do you contribute anything, because anything you have, everyone else automatically has. Read "Stranger In A Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein for further grokking.
Communisim simply weights the scale; instead of, say, one pig always costing two chickens, modified by a) how many pigs there are and b) how many chickens there are, as in Capatalisim/free market, Communisim either a) sets down absolute prices (as in the USSR) or modifies the scale to 'whatever you need in exchange for whatever you can give,' as in True Communisim.
No, in true communism trade is effectively demolished because the entire concept of personal property is demolished. Without personal property, there can be no trade.
The guns didn't cause the problems. The people that stupidly pointed toy guns at cops caused the problems. I know that sounds cliche, and I'm usually for gun control, but restricting production of toy guns is just going overboard.
Oh please. I have an Orange, and not only does it have the same motherboard, it says "APPLE ][" when it starts up! It is most definately an almost exact copy of an Apple ][.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you are talking about, but I personally thought the Java applet was ugly, slow, and worst of all unnecessary. What is so wrong with the design that DMOZ already had?
You should also weigh whether or not the confessor has something to gain from claiming to be guilty. When child porn is more desirable than regular porn, as is the case when posting to those newsgroups, then the poster can get trades easier and/or more hits for whatever site they are advertising for. AFAIK, just calling something child porn is not illegal.
You are saying if I rob a bank and then go to the FBI and say "I robbed that bank", that the FBI should just ignore me because they didn't see it happen.
Its more like saying the FBI should check to make sure the guy confessing isn't just someone who is mentally unstable and looking to be famous. Its not a perfect analogy, but its really hard to imagine a situation where you can profit from confessing to a bank robbery.
That was the whole point of the -noads configure script option comment. That way it would just be a superficial commerciality. And I said other OSS projects so they might be able to cook up some kind of advertising trade agreement or something.
That statement wasn't exactly pro-Napster. It was more like Napster is a bad thing, but we shouldn't get rid of altogether because something worse that we won't be able to get rid of will pop up in its stead.
Face it. Every president lies. Bill Clinton's only fault was that he lied about something really stupid and got caught while he was still in office.
Strange comment, considering that Fair Use is a very communistic (or at least socialistic) concept.
Not that Russia ever followed communistic or even socialistic ideals with anything more than a lip serivce sincerity
Why don't you just sell some advertising for other open source projects, and add a -noads option to the configure script? Wouldn't selling advertisements qualify you to be a commercial venture?
I'm still betting on a trailer in Quazi, Australia. :)
Well then dictionary.com is wrong. Dictionarys only record what words are used as, and are very often either out of date or wrong. Strong atheism asserts that there is no god. Atheism as a whole just denies certain beliefs, and as such, has no beliefs.
Life's beginning is arbitrary because the difference between life and non-life is a matter of definition. As there is really no consistent definition of life, then the choice between life begining at conception, and life begining at birth is arbitrary.
WRT your statistics about drug programs, please post some impartial statistics. Statistics about a program coming from a programs own website are not impartial.
Don't make blanket statements. I am an atheist, as well as many of my friends. I do not know a single person that considers narcotics anonymous a religious program.
Atheism is not, has never been, and will never be a religion. It is not a belief system. It isn't even a belief! It is, pure a simple, an absence of a certain catagory of beliefs, namely those that involve the existence of one or many gods of any sort. And separation of curch and state guarentees Freedom of Religion to everyone except public officals on duty. Public officials off duty can believe whatever they want to. Public officials on duty are supposed to act as if they don't believe in any one religion.
As for your tax comments, getting all the tax money through a tax on consumption will inevitably produce a recession, if not a depression. It would provide a great incentive to consume less and less, and in a consumer based economy, this is disastrous. And about the flat tax, even if the flat tax scheme you propose takes into account interest and capitol gains (which most of them don't) how has a millionaire EARNED his money from interest? He/she hasn't contributed to production in any way, shape, or form. In essence, interest is the result of using your money to steal money from the people actually producing stuff. And BTW, it is most definately the job of the government (at least the tax code setting portion of it) to decide who can afford to give what. That is the whole point in setting a tax code.
I don't know enough to comment about the tax cuts by JFK, but the economic upturn created by Reagan's tax cuts was a mirage supported by the government's deficit spending. When the deficit finally caught up to Reagan, he was gone and Bush Sr. had to deal with the resulting recession. Plain and simple, trickle down economics and deficit spending doesn't work.
To most people, information is stored in order, not disorder (entropy).
BTW, your black hole example was a very bad one because of Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation reduces the mass of a black hole, and therefore its event horizon, and therefore its entropy without releasing any information about what went into the black hole. Your precious information has just been destroyed.
I've never heard of a single time when any president declared a National Day Of Prayer. A national moment of silence, maybe. But that is something completely different.
This concept was developed by people who wanted to protect the common man from an oppressive national government forcing them to have certain religious beliefs. (eg, what is happening with the religion of atheism today in the PRC.)
First of all, atheism isn't a religion. It is an absence of a belief in a god. Secondly, the "beliefs" of atheism can never be force on you against your will because they don't exist. Atheism has no, I repeat, no beliefs, period. And finally, declaring a national day of prayer is forcing beliefs on me. It is forcing the belief that prayer is anything more than just spiritual masturbation.
There's no debate in the scientific community about when life begins - it's at conception - so Mr. Bush apprently believes in protecting the rights of the unborn child.
There's no debate in the scientific community about when life begins because you can't have a scientific debate about something that is arbitary. The point at which life begins is a matter of definition, and cannot be influenced either way by the scientific method.
Many faith-based programs work where "secular" ones fail. For example the rate of recidivism in drug rehabilitation programs is much lower in faith-based programs than in ones that have no faith component.
Please show some statistics.
People who have historically paid more should get more of a break! It's a precentage thing - and it's fair!
This has been addressed by other replies.
Tell me one case where Mr. Ashcroft has not upheld the law.
He lied under oath in his confirmation hearings. There was also a case while he was still governor where according to a new state law, all money from police seizures had to go to the state fund for education, instead of funding the police departments as it used to. Ashcroft is on record telling the police chief that he would "look the other way" if the law wasn't followed.
Even lossless compression slows down your computer. Did you ever run a "transparent" hard drive compression utility? You know, the kind where all your files are compressed, and whenever you open them it decompresses them on the fly? I'll admit it was quite a while ago that I was using it, but the read/write times were quite a bit slower. Maybe it wouldn't be noticeable nowadays, but it sure was back then.
No, you obviously don't know what entropy is. In your original post, you claim that in English, there is usually only one bit of entropy for every byte. Then you tried to use this to support a 8:1 compression ratio. This is utter bullshit. An 8:1 compression ratio would mean 7 bits of entropy for every byte. One bit of entropy for every byte would produce at most an 8:7 compression ratio. Entropy is the useless or redundant information. Just like in chemistry, where the term came from. Entropy is all the heat energy that can't be used for work, because it is too random.
Complete and utter bullshit. Fair use includes space-shifting, time-shifting, and media-shifting, as documented in the RIAA vs. Diamond and Sony vs. Universal City Studios.
Wait! Who was this reporter talking to? The founder of the Seattle Computer Company (the guy who invented DOS), the researchers at Xerox PARC (the guys who invented what would become Windows), or the programmers at Microsoft (the people that modified the programs that the previously mentioned people wrote to create all the different versions of the Microsoft operating systems)? I may have read the article incorrectly, but I got the impression that the journalist was talking to Bill Gates. The last thing that Bill Gates programmed was BASIC. And even that he just modified (read "pirated") from a PDP-11 program that he used at college.
The only problem with that argument is the fact that this was not their first offense. Their history with forcing Dell to package Office, stealing code outright from other companies, etc. shows that they were arrogantly ignoring the law.
Um, no. Those statements are not libel because they are opinions, not facts. You can write any opinion you want to about any person, you just can't write something factually false, and present it as true.
You mean like showing his complete distaste for the separation of church and state by using his first act as president-proper to dedclare the next day a "National Day of Prayer"? Or how about imposing a double standard by removing federal funding to any and all international groups that provide abortions or abortion counseling, but keeping funding for many faith based organizations? Or maybe his sabotage of the federal budget to give the richest 1% of the country a tax break? Or his appointment of an attorney general that has a history of not upholding the law? Just how much bad stuff to you want him to do before we start beating him up?
I admit that Bill Clinton did some things I thought were reprehensible, such as getting us involved in a civil war we had no business in. But Bush has done stuff to rival Clinton's misdeeds, and Clinton had a full 8 years to mess up. Bush has had less than a month. If Bush continues his current course, I sure hope he is impeached before he has a chance to be elected again.
First of all, it was Heisenberg who worked out theory, not Planck. All Planck did was to suggest that maybe electrons could only give out specified amounts of energy.
Secondly, its not "what" and "where" something is, its momentum and position. And the Uncertainty Principle really only applies practically at the sub-atomic level.
And I have read "Animal Farm".
No, you don't "get" anything because you already have it. As does everybody else. Neither do you contribute anything, because anything you have, everyone else automatically has. Read "Stranger In A Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein for further grokking.
No, in true communism trade is effectively demolished because the entire concept of personal property is demolished. Without personal property, there can be no trade.
The guns didn't cause the problems. The people that stupidly pointed toy guns at cops caused the problems. I know that sounds cliche, and I'm usually for gun control, but restricting production of toy guns is just going overboard.
Oh please. I have an Orange, and not only does it have the same motherboard, it says "APPLE ][" when it starts up! It is most definately an almost exact copy of an Apple ][.