Yeah, text only email and web proxies to strip out javascript, etc. Further, safe applications instead of known-buggy ones.
The best step though would be to firewall everyone from everyone else, within your company. Give everyone a publicly-readable directory on a fileserver and there's no reason for anyone to do any p2p access within the company. At this, worms can only spread to and from the servers, which should be easier to keep up to date and patch. Not only because there are fewer, but because their jobs are narrowly defined and testing new patches is pretty easy - less lag time from release to install.
Yeah, I didn't go into detail in this post. The only real way to do it is assume that everyone is an attacker. Don't have a safe and dangerous side of a firewall, instead block everything between everybody, except for known safe things.
Because nobody can see anyone else, infections can't spread. (Assuming you trust your servers - still a lot easier to trust a single machine.)
Yeah, the concept of firewalls is now obsolete. They were great in the day when you were protecting against outsiders but the aptly-named 'Trojan' worms filling the net have shown that assumption to be flawed.
Instead everything needs to be firewalls from everything else. Through every means too. hosts.deny everything, opening only specific holes. Have a router that blocks everything but web traffic to the web proxy, email to the email server, and file sharing with a specific trusted machine. No peer-2-peer access allowed at all, even between servers. Filter *all* broadcast traffic. You, the admin, can turn bits on as needed for diagnostics (and off right away!).
Then, have the email server strip everything except text out of the email. Run it through an HTML parser and send the text output if needed. Web bugs can be a real security problem in high-security installations. Keep the attachments (if any) and let users request them from an admin after your staff scans them. (This process - necessarily in "writing" will keep them from having personal email sent to work - serves two purposes.)
Ditto for web stuff. Filter out javascript. Filter out flash, quicktime, and all other pluggins unless you need one for work. Ideally, filter out downloads of anything but html pages except for certain developer machines (or whoever *needs* it.)
But mostly, never allow any peer-2-peer visibility or access within the company. Treat everyone as if they're a virus-ridden outsider; they probably are.
What I wonder is why you try to keep users secure on the internet. Why not pull them back behind a firewall that only lets text email and "safe" web pages through? (Strip out javascript, activeX, etc.)
I understand that people need access to the database server, and to the version control software, and even to google (and what it points to) and email, but I think you could do this fairly safely if you took the right approach. Start by chopping everything off, then selectively send some sanitized data.
People whine about using only apps that people know, but nobody ever joins a company knowing the five or ten weird apps that only that company uses. Few of our users have used any of the three version control apps we use and we manage to teach them - usually in fifteen minutes and life goes on. Why the big fuss about using an email client they know, or a browser they know?
EMail clients are dead simple to use and they aren't supposed to be browsing the web all day.
It seems like we could end this whole "virus" thing if we made a few decent decisions at a management level. Not get a handle on the patches, not keep up, but end the whole thing.
You aren't going to stop the "bad" uses of genetic engineering by refusing to use it for good purposes. Like trying to stop the use of "the bomb" by not using smoke detectors, just because both use radioactive elements.
I'm sure you do have a valid point, that people will do nasty dehumanizing thing with genetic engineering if they have the chance. They're already planning on doing this and there are many places they could get away with it. Sure. I agree with all of this.
But I can see genetic modifications that save peoples lives, and keep people from being born as cripples who can never live independent lives. We can fix these things here, in the light of public scrutiny. I think it's more likely to have a positive influence of the entire technology than a negative one. If anything, people are going to discuss what is required to give someone a happy life. Once people have a rational basis to evaluate the technology they can confidently move to stop the abuses without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
If we keep it under wraps we'll spend as much time fighting each other over trying to wipe out prevantable diseases as we will trying to stop third-world factories from breeding super-workers without free will.
I see you coming from a Luddite point of view. Your view seems like dislike of the machines rather than dislike of the owners who control them. Once an established technology is around long enough that there are good everyday uses of it, everyone accepts it, even those afraid of change. I have a friend who is a computer programmer and yet argues vehemently against cell-phones. Not that he doesn't want one, but that they have a net negative effect and should not exist. Had he been born ten years later he'd have a cell-phone and be arguing about some technology just on the horizon.
I think that not only can't we put the genie back in the bottle, but we can't stop it from escaping in the first place. We might as well let it out in as controlled a fashion as possible and harness it.
You waste your time doing this, on a foregone conclusion - that I won't listen - because you don't actually have an argument. All you've got is a doom and gloom scenario which you, on a complete lack of evidence, believe is inevitable.
If you actually had an argument. You know, facts, assumptions, and a logically reached conclusion, you'd get a lot farther.
What alternate reality are you people coming from? My mom has a P1-233 w/ 128MB and even in Win98 it's a dog.
Win2k, which is slower, running on a 486 with less RAM? Are you INSANE? Not in a million years would that be usable. Anyone who thought it was would be amazed by RedHat 7.3 on the same machine.
Sure, some on MS's products are faster than some Linux distros. Big suprise. Some Linux distros are faster, by far, than Microsoft's OS too. That's what you get with a customizable platform. You don't have to roll-your-own, you go look for stripped-down distro, or go with one from a few years back. There's not a lot to patch if you don't install everything on the CDs. New version of SSH and the latest kernel, both usually easy upgrades if you get the one for your distro, and you're going. Not much harder than going through Windows Update a few times.
Eugenics sounds scary because it invokes images of Nazi concentration camps, killing underirables. It doesn't have to be that way though.
Well, no, it doesn't, but the problem is, it can be, and almost certainly will be.
How does the possibility of genetic screening mean that we will almost certainly have death camps? And wow, thanks for taking the time to tell me how it will be. I'm sure that because you think there's a problem that it must be doomed to failure.
Oh yeah, a reference to an old book, it must be true. Hey wait, Soylent Green suggested we'd be eating ground up people by now and it was a book... Heinlein's _The Moon was a Harsh Mistress_ said people would be living in prison colonys on the moon, does that mean that's inevitable too?
And who's to say shyness isn't a disorder? If it bothers the person who has it, it's a disorder. Having a way to treat the very real anxiety related to interacting with others is a good thing. It's not like shyness is a modern thing, born of cities and overcrowding. Many people throughout recorded history have been described in as similar to what we call shy. If you could tweak someone at birth and remove the anxiety wouldn't they be better off? If they wanted they could still live a somewhat solitary and quiet life, but it would be for them to choose.
Then think of all the currently known genetic ailments. Predisposed to diabetes, cancer, early heart failure? No problem, a quick tweak and your child won't have any of those problems. Bad eyes? Hemophilia? All taken care of.
Go ask people with those traits if they would like to have never had them.
Sure, you can always come up with some slippery slope argument, and with a reference to either Orwell or Huxley, suggest that it's part of a bleak distopia that's bound to happen. I've heard the argument about a hundred things, all the issue that will tip us into the fire. Try something other than an emotional appeal.
Eugenics sounds scary because it invokes images of Nazi concentration camps, killing underirables. It doesn't have to be that way though, you could engineer just as well by splicing out damaged genes from an egg, pre-conception.
While some people would argue over the genetic fitness of light skin in southern areas (or vice versa), it should be easy to find diseases that everyone (or at least the non-kooks) would agree should be abolished.
Some diseases might only be a problem in certain contexts, or offer immunity to other things (sickle-cell anemia and malaria?) and perhaps shouldn't be wiped out without a better understanding, but there are some cases which are pretty cut and dried.
Hold down a number-key on your Nokia phone, after a second it'll call whoever that speed-dial key is associated with.
You might also be able to use arcade games as a previous example. Even back in the late 80s you charged up your attack, not just to do more damage but to switch to alternate modes of attack.
Of course, this is Microsoft. All they need patents for is a reasonable excuse to begin a court action - they'll just bankrupt you without regard for the validity of the patent.
It's simple. Theories that provide a valid way to predict the results of your actions have value. Gravity is a simple concept - two things pull each other together. A caveman might, based on limited analytical tools and testing equipment that the Earth simply sucks, but that's a valid attempt. As long as he'd consider that it might not be exactly right.
If you have a theory that experience has proven is not helpful in predicting the outcome of your actions, it's not useful and should be discarded.
A theory that fits the observed results is a theory you can use to determine your actions. "Hot stove - hurts to touch - don't touch hot part of stove." That's worth something. A "theory" (non-testable wish fulfillment) about how god is going to grant you eternal happiness just because someone said so... or that there are invisible pink unicorns which can't affect the world in any way. That's not very helpful in predicting anything and thus is worthless.
Useful, versus worthless. No moral judgement needed.
This doesn't mean that all ideas must be related to "science". If you like music, or orchids, or pine-scented air-fresheners, fine; like them for the sake of simple happiness. You don't need spiritualism and religion to justify it.
What kind of knowledge you intend to discover by sitting around deciding on what god should be like, or what spiritual forces you want to exist? That's more shallow and wish-fulfilling that simply following one of the standard religions.
Being open minded doesn't mean believing in anything, it means being willing to accept evidence fairly. Show me some evidence that supports what you believe, we'll work on tests to see if it holds up and I'll base my belief on those results.
Athiesm is literally "a-thiesm", or "not-theistic". It's a lack of belief in god. Agnostics are undecided at some level; athiests simply do not believe.
It's doesn't have to be a firm conviction that there isn't a god. Simply not believing in god, much as you don't believe in Santa, or unicorns, is enough.
There's no more solid proof for one that the other.
If someone comes into your store and asks for a Pepsi you can say "I don't sell Pepsi, would you like a Coke?" And in fact, what else could you do? Just say no without offering any alternatives? Would it be allowable to offer a beer, but not a Coke?
Anyways, all Google's ad was doing was suggesting alternatives, not misrepresenting them as the trademark owner. Saying "Yeah, I know you want that company, but have you considered this other company?" Nothing illegal because there's no misrepresentation. (Not inherently, that would depend on if the company in the ad pretended to be AXA, not simply that they wanted to be listed as an alternative.)
Had they silently redirected your request from Coke to Pepsi, bringing the wrong beverage, that would be a trademark violation.
Any of the SLRs will take a picture NOW. Obviously if you wave the camera in the direction of the subject and want it to focus and meter and so on, it'll take a while, but the shutter lag on my Canon 300D is only 20ms or so longer than the EOS 1 series. It's all about how you set it and what you want it to do for you.
I think you're also grossly mistaken about the "resolution" of film. Scan you film however you like and blow it up to 'actual-pixels' in photoshop, compare with a high-quality digital photo at actual pixels. Ask yourself if the film photo is as clear as the digital, at that resolution. If it isn't, you aren't getting a comparable measurement.
It's generally accepted that very fine-grained films can get 12+ megapixels of quality, but it'll be in a file 4-times the size, at least. If you've got a 24 "MP" film scan, you aren't getting 24 digital-quality MP out of it.
Besides, while my camera only takes 3 shots per second and hits a wall around six, it doesn't cost me $.50 per shot for film, processing, and printing. How often do you machine-gun through a roll? And what does that professional scan cost?
If you're a tinkerer at all, consider buying an old CRT projector. They aren't as bright (not that you need all the lumens the business projectors throw) and you need to focus the three guns seperately, but once you do you get a very nice picture without the flaws of the current generation.
I see rainbows in DLP projectors, as do most people I know, though some don't seem bothered by it. LCDs aren't offensive, but the screen-door look isn't very impressive. CRTs don't have either problem.
This is the route I went. A friend of mine bought me an Electrohome ECP-4101 projector off of EBay for USD 1200 after reconditioning. (Funny how the price has fallen, this one was $50k USD in the mid-90s when new.)
It's 30kg and big, but cheaper than the decent modern projectors and without the artifacts I mentioned.
It'll do 1280x1024 and movies look great when played by the computer, much better than out of even high-end DVD players. Easily accomplished with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It's also a great screen for games, or computing when sick.
They have a ten thousand hour lifespan, but if you leave them on a static screen they can suffer burn-in a bit (like old monitors).
I just didn't think the current generation of LCD or DLP projectors were ready. They're small, but expensive and not that great of quality. In five or ten years I'm sure I'll get one, but I didn't want to be on the bleeding edge.
WWI - Stop the Germans WWII - Stop the Germans Korea - Stop the North Koreans... In every war since WWII we (I'm Canadian, but 'we' the Allies) have had the ability to wipe out whole countries. We haven't because the point isn't to kill the Germans but to stop them. Ditto with Saddam recently. Many fervent supporters of the war are Iraqi expats who know about all the atrocities there and want their families to live in a better country. If the goal was simply to kill people it'd be done.
I don't understand where this attitude comes from. Our forces have traditionally been very discriminatory in their use of force. Personally I want more accurate missiles. At least that way they'll only hit the people they aim at. In an age of terrorists intentionally hiding in a civilian population this is more important.
There's a difference between expecting a library to allocate space for new instances of objects you create and expecting it to allocate space for strings it returns. Calling foo.delete() is different than FreeString(foo).
Gnerally, for buffers and such, the highest-level code that looks in the buffer should allocate it and pass it to every other level of code.
This way, ideally, the allocate and the free are next to each other.
And with the upcoming election I'm sure more people will realize it.
I'd certainly like better representation and I work for it. Our systems are far from perfect but they're also far far better than what many people live in.
And yet if you have to keep someone ignorant to keep them part of your culture that your culture is sick.
Let people subscribe to the censored internet feed if they feel the need to be protected. Let other people decide for themselves. If people immediately start dropping your culture and your religious when they see alternatives it means they didn't really want to be part of it.
It's really funny how people will accept "that's how they choose to live" to describe the squallor and brutality of many countries, yet wouldn't accept "I killed him to save his soul" or "we had to destroy the village to save it." I don't see much of a difference.
I'm not saying third-world countries are hell-holes. I'm saying that specific totalitarian or theocratic countires are hell-holes.
And no, most people don't get shot in the back of the head. They've learned to keep their head down, never to speak up, never to try to get ahead, never to try to question. It's only people who try to determine the course of their own life who have problems. Wonderful. And yeah, sure, it's not like the only thought in their heads are of oppression. I'm sure most days they just want to get home to dinner.
Does that mean they've got government they like, or merely that they've learned to avoid pissing anyone off?
I'm not advocating that everyone follows US values as you imply. I'm merely advocating that people get to choose how they want to live their lives. If they freely choose (minus unjust persecution should they decide otherwise) to be part of the religious majority, let them. But if they don't have a choice it's evil of you to imply that they somehow picked their situation. It's the new-age party line; "Interference is evil, *they* choose to live like that."
As for most people not wanting freedom of thought for others, tough. That's simply their stupidity in not realizing that their good and normal thoughts are someone else's heresy. If they want to be allowed to follow their stupid little religions they have to accept my godlessness and vice versa. Otherwise we'd be nothing but a collection of third-world hell-holes murdering each other over what flavour of god we had. Besides, I think the fact that the governments in these countries are cracking down on sources of outside information proves that the people are not happy to be told what to think, despite what their leaders would like to suggest.
I'm sure the muslim women who are stoned to death for being raped choose to be there...
How can you say that people CHOOSE a non-democratic government? Did they pick Saddam out of a lineup? Even if he had some support, was it merely because he was the best of the bad?
Anyways, most of the resistance to US occupation in Iraq is religious in nature. Who else would be stupid enough to strap a bomb to themselves?
As for the Kurds, they've got a lot better chance with US or UN occupation and oversight than they did under Saddam or under a theocracy.
If the 'culture' believes that individuals should choose, let them. If it believes that the citizens should follow government rule, make them choose.
But I think basic human rights should include the right to uncensored information, the right to leave a country (petition someone else to take you). And the right to freedom of thought - religion or otherwise.
If your citizens can read and believe what they want and have a realistic chance to leave, you can safely assume you aren't mistreating them too much if they stay.
It's pretty easy to objectively look at a secular-ish society like much of Europe or North America and say that it is in almost all ways better than a fundemantalist repressive, often religious, state.
Compare Sweden to Iran, or Canada to North Korea. Or even the USA to China.
Few people get hauled out at night and shot in the back of the head. Most people are free to say what they think, anything from bizarre politics to advocating child-adult sex.
People have much more of a say in how the country is run and even in fairly socialist countries they have a lot of economic freedom and wealth.
History hasn't shown that communism is flawed, contrary to popular belief. What it has shown is that close-minded repressive societies are flawed. Look at China, once a world power, now a maker of plastic toys. Look at Russia, once a world power, now what...? Look at the Middle-East - a fifteen-hundred years ago it was the center of the educated world. Now it's a hell-hole full of martyr-wannabees.
Nothing against the people, it's the environments. Russia is lucky that they don't have a religion or tradition of obediance to authority that held them back. China's *slowly* crawling forward. The Middle-East is a write-off.
It's simplistic and harmful to suggest that ideas of Iran, or Saudi Arabia for examples, are on a level with those of more free and democratic nations. The people there want to get around the censorship, but the government surely must know what's best.
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Yeah, text only email and web proxies to strip out javascript, etc. Further, safe applications instead of known-buggy ones.
The best step though would be to firewall everyone from everyone else, within your company. Give everyone a publicly-readable directory on a fileserver and there's no reason for anyone to do any p2p access within the company. At this, worms can only spread to and from the servers, which should be easier to keep up to date and patch. Not only because there are fewer, but because their jobs are narrowly defined and testing new patches is pretty easy - less lag time from release to install.
Yeah, I didn't go into detail in this post. The only real way to do it is assume that everyone is an attacker. Don't have a safe and dangerous side of a firewall, instead block everything between everybody, except for known safe things.
Because nobody can see anyone else, infections can't spread. (Assuming you trust your servers - still a lot easier to trust a single machine.)
Yeah, the concept of firewalls is now obsolete. They were great in the day when you were protecting against outsiders but the aptly-named 'Trojan' worms filling the net have shown that assumption to be flawed.
Instead everything needs to be firewalls from everything else. Through every means too. hosts.deny everything, opening only specific holes. Have a router that blocks everything but web traffic to the web proxy, email to the email server, and file sharing with a specific trusted machine. No peer-2-peer access allowed at all, even between servers. Filter *all* broadcast traffic. You, the admin, can turn bits on as needed for diagnostics (and off right away!).
Then, have the email server strip everything except text out of the email. Run it through an HTML parser and send the text output if needed. Web bugs can be a real security problem in high-security installations. Keep the attachments (if any) and let users request them from an admin after your staff scans them. (This process - necessarily in "writing" will keep them from having personal email sent to work - serves two purposes.)
Ditto for web stuff. Filter out javascript. Filter out flash, quicktime, and all other pluggins unless you need one for work. Ideally, filter out downloads of anything but html pages except for certain developer machines (or whoever *needs* it.)
But mostly, never allow any peer-2-peer visibility or access within the company. Treat everyone as if they're a virus-ridden outsider; they probably are.
What I wonder is why you try to keep users secure on the internet. Why not pull them back behind a firewall that only lets text email and "safe" web pages through? (Strip out javascript, activeX, etc.)
I understand that people need access to the database server, and to the version control software, and even to google (and what it points to) and email, but I think you could do this fairly safely if you took the right approach. Start by chopping everything off, then selectively send some sanitized data.
People whine about using only apps that people know, but nobody ever joins a company knowing the five or ten weird apps that only that company uses. Few of our users have used any of the three version control apps we use and we manage to teach them - usually in fifteen minutes and life goes on. Why the big fuss about using an email client they know, or a browser they know?
EMail clients are dead simple to use and they aren't supposed to be browsing the web all day.
It seems like we could end this whole "virus" thing if we made a few decent decisions at a management level. Not get a handle on the patches, not keep up, but end the whole thing.
You aren't going to stop the "bad" uses of genetic engineering by refusing to use it for good purposes. Like trying to stop the use of "the bomb" by not using smoke detectors, just because both use radioactive elements.
I'm sure you do have a valid point, that people will do nasty dehumanizing thing with genetic engineering if they have the chance. They're already planning on doing this and there are many places they could get away with it. Sure. I agree with all of this.
But I can see genetic modifications that save peoples lives, and keep people from being born as cripples who can never live independent lives. We can fix these things here, in the light of public scrutiny. I think it's more likely to have a positive influence of the entire technology than a negative one. If anything, people are going to discuss what is required to give someone a happy life. Once people have a rational basis to evaluate the technology they can confidently move to stop the abuses without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
If we keep it under wraps we'll spend as much time fighting each other over trying to wipe out prevantable diseases as we will trying to stop third-world factories from breeding super-workers without free will.
I see you coming from a Luddite point of view. Your view seems like dislike of the machines rather than dislike of the owners who control them. Once an established technology is around long enough that there are good everyday uses of it, everyone accepts it, even those afraid of change. I have a friend who is a computer programmer and yet argues vehemently against cell-phones. Not that he doesn't want one, but that they have a net negative effect and should not exist. Had he been born ten years later he'd have a cell-phone and be arguing about some technology just on the horizon.
I think that not only can't we put the genie back in the bottle, but we can't stop it from escaping in the first place. We might as well let it out in as controlled a fashion as possible and harness it.
You waste your time doing this, on a foregone conclusion - that I won't listen - because you don't actually have an argument. All you've got is a doom and gloom scenario which you, on a complete lack of evidence, believe is inevitable.
If you actually had an argument. You know, facts, assumptions, and a logically reached conclusion, you'd get a lot farther.
Good luck luddite, I expect you'll need it.
What alternate reality are you people coming from? My mom has a P1-233 w/ 128MB and even in Win98 it's a dog.
Win2k, which is slower, running on a 486 with less RAM? Are you INSANE? Not in a million years would that be usable. Anyone who thought it was would be amazed by RedHat 7.3 on the same machine.
Sure, some on MS's products are faster than some Linux distros. Big suprise. Some Linux distros are faster, by far, than Microsoft's OS too. That's what you get with a customizable platform. You don't have to roll-your-own, you go look for stripped-down distro, or go with one from a few years back. There's not a lot to patch if you don't install everything on the CDs. New version of SSH and the latest kernel, both usually easy upgrades if you get the one for your distro, and you're going. Not much harder than going through Windows Update a few times.
How does the possibility of genetic screening mean that we will almost certainly have death camps? And wow, thanks for taking the time to tell me how it will be. I'm sure that because you think there's a problem that it must be doomed to failure.
Oh yeah, a reference to an old book, it must be true. Hey wait, Soylent Green suggested we'd be eating ground up people by now and it was a book... Heinlein's _The Moon was a Harsh Mistress_ said people would be living in prison colonys on the moon, does that mean that's inevitable too?
And who's to say shyness isn't a disorder? If it bothers the person who has it, it's a disorder. Having a way to treat the very real anxiety related to interacting with others is a good thing. It's not like shyness is a modern thing, born of cities and overcrowding. Many people throughout recorded history have been described in as similar to what we call shy. If you could tweak someone at birth and remove the anxiety wouldn't they be better off? If they wanted they could still live a somewhat solitary and quiet life, but it would be for them to choose.
Then think of all the currently known genetic ailments. Predisposed to diabetes, cancer, early heart failure? No problem, a quick tweak and your child won't have any of those problems. Bad eyes? Hemophilia? All taken care of.
Go ask people with those traits if they would like to have never had them.
Sure, you can always come up with some slippery slope argument, and with a reference to either Orwell or Huxley, suggest that it's part of a bleak distopia that's bound to happen. I've heard the argument about a hundred things, all the issue that will tip us into the fire. Try something other than an emotional appeal.
Eugenics sounds scary because it invokes images of Nazi concentration camps, killing underirables. It doesn't have to be that way though, you could engineer just as well by splicing out damaged genes from an egg, pre-conception.
While some people would argue over the genetic fitness of light skin in southern areas (or vice versa), it should be easy to find diseases that everyone (or at least the non-kooks) would agree should be abolished.
Some diseases might only be a problem in certain contexts, or offer immunity to other things (sickle-cell anemia and malaria?) and perhaps shouldn't be wiped out without a better understanding, but there are some cases which are pretty cut and dried.
Hold down a number-key on your Nokia phone, after a second it'll call whoever that speed-dial key is associated with.
You might also be able to use arcade games as a previous example. Even back in the late 80s you charged up your attack, not just to do more damage but to switch to alternate modes of attack.
Of course, this is Microsoft. All they need patents for is a reasonable excuse to begin a court action - they'll just bankrupt you without regard for the validity of the patent.
There's no legal precedent to support client-access licenses being requirred to access a server.
That's simply supported by any contracts you might sign with Microsoft.
It's simple. Theories that provide a valid way to predict the results of your actions have value. Gravity is a simple concept - two things pull each other together. A caveman might, based on limited analytical tools and testing equipment that the Earth simply sucks, but that's a valid attempt. As long as he'd consider that it might not be exactly right.
If you have a theory that experience has proven is not helpful in predicting the outcome of your actions, it's not useful and should be discarded.
A theory that fits the observed results is a theory you can use to determine your actions. "Hot stove - hurts to touch - don't touch hot part of stove." That's worth something. A "theory" (non-testable wish fulfillment) about how god is going to grant you eternal happiness just because someone said so... or that there are invisible pink unicorns which can't affect the world in any way. That's not very helpful in predicting anything and thus is worthless.
Useful, versus worthless. No moral judgement needed.
This doesn't mean that all ideas must be related to "science". If you like music, or orchids, or pine-scented air-fresheners, fine; like them for the sake of simple happiness. You don't need spiritualism and religion to justify it.
What kind of knowledge you intend to discover by sitting around deciding on what god should be like, or what spiritual forces you want to exist? That's more shallow and wish-fulfilling that simply following one of the standard religions.
Being open minded doesn't mean believing in anything, it means being willing to accept evidence fairly. Show me some evidence that supports what you believe, we'll work on tests to see if it holds up and I'll base my belief on those results.
Your dictionary is faulty.
Athiesm is literally "a-thiesm", or "not-theistic". It's a lack of belief in god. Agnostics are undecided at some level; athiests simply do not believe.
It's doesn't have to be a firm conviction that there isn't a god. Simply not believing in god, much as you don't believe in Santa, or unicorns, is enough.
There's no more solid proof for one that the other.
If someone comes into your store and asks for a Pepsi you can say "I don't sell Pepsi, would you like a Coke?" And in fact, what else could you do? Just say no without offering any alternatives? Would it be allowable to offer a beer, but not a Coke?
Anyways, all Google's ad was doing was suggesting alternatives, not misrepresenting them as the trademark owner. Saying "Yeah, I know you want that company, but have you considered this other company?" Nothing illegal because there's no misrepresentation. (Not inherently, that would depend on if the company in the ad pretended to be AXA, not simply that they wanted to be listed as an alternative.)
Had they silently redirected your request from Coke to Pepsi, bringing the wrong beverage, that would be a trademark violation.
Any of the SLRs will take a picture NOW. Obviously if you wave the camera in the direction of the subject and want it to focus and meter and so on, it'll take a while, but the shutter lag on my Canon 300D is only 20ms or so longer than the EOS 1 series. It's all about how you set it and what you want it to do for you.
I think you're also grossly mistaken about the "resolution" of film. Scan you film however you like and blow it up to 'actual-pixels' in photoshop, compare with a high-quality digital photo at actual pixels. Ask yourself if the film photo is as clear as the digital, at that resolution. If it isn't, you aren't getting a comparable measurement.
It's generally accepted that very fine-grained films can get 12+ megapixels of quality, but it'll be in a file 4-times the size, at least. If you've got a 24 "MP" film scan, you aren't getting 24 digital-quality MP out of it.
Besides, while my camera only takes 3 shots per second and hits a wall around six, it doesn't cost me $.50 per shot for film, processing, and printing. How often do you machine-gun through a roll? And what does that professional scan cost?
If you're a tinkerer at all, consider buying an old CRT projector. They aren't as bright (not that you need all the lumens the business projectors throw) and you need to focus the three guns seperately, but once you do you get a very nice picture without the flaws of the current generation.
I see rainbows in DLP projectors, as do most people I know, though some don't seem bothered by it. LCDs aren't offensive, but the screen-door look isn't very impressive. CRTs don't have either problem.
This is the route I went. A friend of mine bought me an Electrohome ECP-4101 projector off of EBay for USD 1200 after reconditioning. (Funny how the price has fallen, this one was $50k USD in the mid-90s when new.)
It's 30kg and big, but cheaper than the decent modern projectors and without the artifacts I mentioned.
It'll do 1280x1024 and movies look great when played by the computer, much better than out of even high-end DVD players. Easily accomplished with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It's also a great screen for games, or computing when sick.
They have a ten thousand hour lifespan, but if you leave them on a static screen they can suffer burn-in a bit (like old monitors).
I just didn't think the current generation of LCD or DLP projectors were ready. They're small, but expensive and not that great of quality. In five or ten years I'm sure I'll get one, but I didn't want to be on the bleeding edge.
WWI - Stop the Germans ...
WWII - Stop the Germans
Korea - Stop the North Koreans
In every war since WWII we (I'm Canadian, but 'we' the Allies) have had the ability to wipe out whole countries. We haven't because the point isn't to kill the Germans but to stop them. Ditto with Saddam recently. Many fervent supporters of the war are Iraqi expats who know about all the atrocities there and want their families to live in a better country. If the goal was simply to kill people it'd be done.
I don't understand where this attitude comes from. Our forces have traditionally been very discriminatory in their use of force. Personally I want more accurate missiles. At least that way they'll only hit the people they aim at. In an age of terrorists intentionally hiding in a civilian population this is more important.
There's a difference between expecting a library to allocate space for new instances of objects you create and expecting it to allocate space for strings it returns. Calling foo.delete() is different than FreeString(foo).
Gnerally, for buffers and such, the highest-level code that looks in the buffer should allocate it and pass it to every other level of code.
This way, ideally, the allocate and the free are next to each other.
And with the upcoming election I'm sure more people will realize it.
I'd certainly like better representation and I work for it. Our systems are far from perfect but they're also far far better than what many people live in.
And yet if you have to keep someone ignorant to keep them part of your culture that your culture is sick.
Let people subscribe to the censored internet feed if they feel the need to be protected. Let other people decide for themselves. If people immediately start dropping your culture and your religious when they see alternatives it means they didn't really want to be part of it.
It's really funny how people will accept "that's how they choose to live" to describe the squallor and brutality of many countries, yet wouldn't accept "I killed him to save his soul" or "we had to destroy the village to save it." I don't see much of a difference.
I'm not saying third-world countries are hell-holes. I'm saying that specific totalitarian or theocratic countires are hell-holes.
And no, most people don't get shot in the back of the head. They've learned to keep their head down, never to speak up, never to try to get ahead, never to try to question. It's only people who try to determine the course of their own life who have problems. Wonderful. And yeah, sure, it's not like the only thought in their heads are of oppression. I'm sure most days they just want to get home to dinner.
Does that mean they've got government they like, or merely that they've learned to avoid pissing anyone off?
I'm not advocating that everyone follows US values as you imply. I'm merely advocating that people get to choose how they want to live their lives. If they freely choose (minus unjust persecution should they decide otherwise) to be part of the religious majority, let them. But if they don't have a choice it's evil of you to imply that they somehow picked their situation. It's the new-age party line; "Interference is evil, *they* choose to live like that."
As for most people not wanting freedom of thought for others, tough. That's simply their stupidity in not realizing that their good and normal thoughts are someone else's heresy. If they want to be allowed to follow their stupid little religions they have to accept my godlessness and vice versa. Otherwise we'd be nothing but a collection of third-world hell-holes murdering each other over what flavour of god we had. Besides, I think the fact that the governments in these countries are cracking down on sources of outside information proves that the people are not happy to be told what to think, despite what their leaders would like to suggest.
I'm sure the muslim women who are stoned to death for being raped choose to be there...
How can you say that people CHOOSE a non-democratic government? Did they pick Saddam out of a lineup? Even if he had some support, was it merely because he was the best of the bad?
Anyways, most of the resistance to US occupation in Iraq is religious in nature. Who else would be stupid enough to strap a bomb to themselves?
As for the Kurds, they've got a lot better chance with US or UN occupation and oversight than they did under Saddam or under a theocracy.
If the 'culture' believes that individuals should choose, let them. If it believes that the citizens should follow government rule, make them choose.
But I think basic human rights should include the right to uncensored information, the right to leave a country (petition someone else to take you). And the right to freedom of thought - religion or otherwise.
If your citizens can read and believe what they want and have a realistic chance to leave, you can safely assume you aren't mistreating them too much if they stay.
This is far from universal though.
It's pretty easy to objectively look at a secular-ish society like much of Europe or North America and say that it is in almost all ways better than a fundemantalist repressive, often religious, state.
Compare Sweden to Iran, or Canada to North Korea. Or even the USA to China.
Few people get hauled out at night and shot in the back of the head. Most people are free to say what they think, anything from bizarre politics to advocating child-adult sex.
People have much more of a say in how the country is run and even in fairly socialist countries they have a lot of economic freedom and wealth.
History hasn't shown that communism is flawed, contrary to popular belief. What it has shown is that close-minded repressive societies are flawed. Look at China, once a world power, now a maker of plastic toys. Look at Russia, once a world power, now what...? Look at the Middle-East - a fifteen-hundred years ago it was the center of the educated world. Now it's a hell-hole full of martyr-wannabees.
Nothing against the people, it's the environments. Russia is lucky that they don't have a religion or tradition of obediance to authority that held them back. China's *slowly* crawling forward. The Middle-East is a write-off.
It's simplistic and harmful to suggest that ideas of Iran, or Saudi Arabia for examples, are on a level with those of more free and democratic nations. The people there want to get around the censorship, but the government surely must know what's best.