I don't belive, if something isn't creative it will not be successfull forever. This type of incentive to monopoly of Batmans and say Sailor Moons is a incentive to the original author repeat the same old blah blah blah.
And in fact this is exactly what we see in the comic book world, the story lines are recreated regularly. And even batman and the daredevil (even more), if weren't for Frank Miller would have a very lower popularity today. The kind of recicling I was talking about do happen, in a controlled and slower way, today, since DC copies it self over and over and ocasionaly something new grabs to the character.
Also I was not saying that Joe Doe should be making a living ou of his fan fiction, all I am saying is that he should be able to create a history about batman or harry potter without fear of having to surrender all his money and live forever in debt for a big company. People should be allowed to create what ever they want, the comercial exploration of those things could be controlated.
Off course 99% of the stuff will be as bad ot worst then the official stuff... But who knows what are we loosing in the last 1%?
Comunism isn't "bad", totalitarism is. Cuba has many problems, due to the dictatorship of Castro, but many people live much better now then they would if were not for Castro and Comunism. His goverment is competent and even thougth Cuba is indeed a poor country, and big bad trade Embargo don't help. Sure he once had the backing of the USSR but he still manages to make Cuba a much better place, with the exception of guantanamo pehaps, then the neighbohood capitalism places.
Not all people must have a new iPod to be happy. Consumism is only good when you can buy, in many places, all those shinny shoes and gadgets are a form of tirany a way of separating the people who have from those who don't. This cool cell phone that many people use here is stating to the poor kid on that sell candy on the corner to be able to eat that he do not worth a damn. He's culture is not worth, and in fact many people here hate, or heted, the "carioca funk" before they found out that it was hitting in Europe.
Many people are strugling to live in my country while international bankers charge millions of dollars of interest from a debt that was already payed. We have to sell stuff for you using your dollars, just so you can inflate the market with more dolars so when we actually use those dollars the worth less then what we sold.
So capitalism is no angel of goodness. By seeing what you people are saying even your people is suffering from it. There is a growing poor class in the US that can barely live, and many factories are leaving to third world countries, even here, searching for lower costs and contributing to this growth.
Saying XYZ is evil or good is a way of oversimplifying things.
however, It can be done with no knowledge of any math at all.
Just because somthing can be done without any knowledge of math it means that it is not math? I guess then that all criptography is done in a similar way, people use hard core cripto with their browsers almost everyday, but most of them have no idea of what is happening, so I guess those are not math either.
Just becuase somtheing is simple enouth dosen't mean it isn't math, people calculate change and it is simple and it is math. People do those criptograms in puzzle magazines and it too is math. And your hedgerow cipher is math also, it may be simple but math is not incompatible with simple as many people believe.
And you're right, quantum criptography is a encryption, but not for the reason you stated. Using quantum teleportation you can verify if something was seen by a unauthorized third party, but otherwise it is a mean of transporting information (not encription). But to use it, people will probably send a one time pad, in laymans words a bunch of random data. Since the receiver could (not anymore as it seem) verify that he was the only receiver of this particular pad, the other end could then use the pad to encode (with a simple binary xor) the plain text and send it, this could even be sended in a more usual fashion, if it is cheaper since it is encripted with a key that is as big as the message there is no way to break it since every message with the same lenght could be encoded to the same result.
One time pads are unbreakable, but they must be used only one time, you must have the same amount of key and data, and be sure to transport it securely to the other end. Those requirements, almost always make the one time pad unusable.
But you yourself is stating that google is either responsible or not for censorship. Why should google not apply to local laws in china when it does apply to USA laws even thougth many people here don't love them. Why only now start to throw stones in google.
What if google started to play the "I will protect the world against tirany" "super company" and stoped working with countries that have DMCA like laws or one of the hundreds of laws and legislations that were created to protect the Americans from the big bad terrorist that limit your civil rights? Just because a law is an "American law" it is by nature better then any other law?
Each country has a culture, a policy and a law. If you want to sell beer here in Brazil you will probably make an advertising that would feature bautiful women in tiny bikinis, and this will not shock anyone here. Meanwhile the same advertising could be seen as a pervertion by some people in other countries. Should a brasilian beer company that want to sell for those other countries use an advert that will shock people just so it can not be censored???
Sure we all disagree with the position of china's goverment and this kind of political censorship. My coutry, Brazil, was recently a target of a brutal military goverment, and we know what is to have censored papers and people disapearing and being tortured by the state because of their ideals. All the papers that were legal, had to follow the censorship, even the ones that had a more leftward position. This goverment had the backing of the USA, after all this goverment, that censored, tortured and killed people was fighting the "big bad comunist".
no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
Bold comment, but I would say compleatly untrue. Sure if you define a story in broad terms like "a romance that is forbiden and it ends with a tragedy" you can fit a few thousand books, movies and plays into that. But only one of those is "Romeu and Juliet", would you say that all of those are the same?
I guess you will try to argue that the newer are "rip-offs" from the original. But I would say that there's no culture without "riping off". Coping and improving is what we do, and when is done well it can be good, very good. Most of the music is done in a similar way, good musitian influence the newer generation and were infuenced by big names that he used to hear when he was young.
I believe that all this race to protect every single idea that can be selled to the point that people can't replay a "buffy episode" in the comunity theather or Joseph Doe can't create a fan fiction featuring batman or maybe "batguy" is bad for the culture in general.
All that said, I would like to say that if this Joseph Doe character starts selling, or attempt to get a profit from his fan-fiction, then maybe the original authors could ask for a piece of those profits.
I know it is too late to write anything and someone actually read it...:-D but...
Nowaday I get more worried about reliability then capacity, sure changing spins in eletrons can be fun and squeeze more the one terabyte (or it would be terabibytes, whatever), but would that electron maintain that specific spin for how long? ten years? one year? two weeks?
I would buy a cd sized that would hold something like a cd, 700Mb, and would keep its data if I drove a car over it and subject it to a oven, followed by a freezer temperature. this would be cool! I want a media reliable for my backups.:-)
The point is not that, designers that are used to work on paper know what to expect from a CMYK color. They know the amount of ink they need to get a result they thought. My wife is a designer, and I've watched her working with colors that she knew weren't quite right in the monitor or her's inkjet printer, but she knew that they would get rigth once they were printed in offset (and it worked).
Also the possibility to work with any number of color channels is very useful also, one of her covers had 3 colors (red, black and bronze) and even photoshop couldn't handle that in a workable way.
It does not have 'helper apps'? It does not start the program bittorrent when download a.torrent? Does it run a plugin when the page states it to do it, like when you enter the site 'trailers.apple.com'?
Well if it does not do any of the above I would congratulate you. But my guess is that it does many of the above, at least in it's default state. Browsers today are very complex by them selves, html, xhtml, xml, css, canvas, mathml, svg, gif, jpeg, png and others are necessary (ok some of those aren't yet necessary) to handle by the browser it self. But beyond that there is java, quicktime, WMP, mpg, mp3, ogg and many, many, many other files that people want to be able to access in a somewhat seamless way in the web.
The browser has to rely on external viewers and plugins to handle those formats, and maybe other that are yet to be invented. I only think that there should be a sandbox arround all of that, so that when shit happens (and it will) at list you are already in the litter box.:-)
I am not saying executing the file it self. But if you download a.mp3 file does it play automaticly? It is because safari has started an external program. The browser can be very fine, but imagine that the mp3 player have a flaw that can run executables? Then someone could hide a malware into a mp3 file, but this does not concern only mp3, all the files that have 'viewers' can be affected.
A sandbox that I was proposing, but did not write it down (so I am lazy:-P) was suposed to run both the browser and the helper application in a special environment, maybe something as simple as a 'nobody' user that have no rights over the real user data or even an emulated layer that have no access to anything in the computer.
So I was lazy, did not specify what I meant and that was a bad post.:P No one is perfect.:-D
A sandbox for the browser would be nice. It the browser could not start any applications automaticaly, and even firefox can do this, it would certainly be more secure.
Even better, I think is not to allow direct execution from the desktop shell. If you want to execute something make a 'desktop' file pointing to it. Also don't permit desktop files to have relative URLs, if this was possible an atacker could send the.desktop file with the executable in the same compressed file.
You know what, what about companies that censor themselves so they can still be allowed to the white house press conferences? Or companies that censor themselves to not step on the advertising company's feet? Or maybe companies that are allied to some backward thinking group?
So go ahead call me a troll if you want, but I see many news agencies and papers doing much worst then google and no one talk about it. This kind of auto-censorship is being around almost always and has hidden many truths from you people (not someone who is in china), you're the affected.
Ohhh, but those censorship are OK, since they are not mandated by the government. You want my opinion, bullshit, those are not okay and are much worst then google applying to china's law. We have a saying here that goes like this "in Roma like the Romans", and that is what google is doing.
So I question, what good is free speech if no one has the guts to speak what people need to hear? What good does the law does, when there are other ways to suppress the news, by using either money or political pressures?
It is my opinion that google is doing more good by having a censored Chinese version than if it had no appearance in china at all. They are being clear that there is censorship and making it clear for the people that they are being oppressed by someone, while in the case of free speech in the western side of the world we are indeed being oppressed without anyone noticing.
They would be linear if you have no caps, since your precision is limited to a predefined range those operations are not linear. In fact those are lossy operations and could make the record sound terribly with a noticeable distortion.
But relativity don't say that the event that happened one year ago, and just now is observed, is happening now. It tells that depending on yuor point of view it may have happend simultaneosly or not to another event. What happen is that if you measure the moment of a flash (for instance) here it dosen't follow that from some other point of view the moment that you stoped your watch and the moment of the flash are simultaneous.
This is hard to grasp, but it is what happen, and some measurements that we use daily depends on those variations, for instance the GPS satelite clocks as someone else stated.
You do have a point, but those who are fanning this incidents are the radicals, and they just layed eyes on this now. But this dosen't take the fact that figuring their profet with a bomb in his head or a line of suicider bombers trying to enter the pardise are bad taste. If those were about jews, homosexuals or colored people, I would expect the same kind of reaction from the targets.
Ok I agree with you, not all fundamentalist are raging lunatics.:-P But the other point I was making is somewhat truth those raging lunatics that want to explode everything and everyone that don't think like them are rarely a good measure unit for the people they say they represent.
Do Christian Americans really believe that killing is wrong? Sure killing an American is the worst sin any one can commit, but what about muslin's or Communists before that? The USA, for as long as I can remember, was always happy to find a new war or a new enemy. And the people, maybe the radical Christian even more, aways were behind those decisions.
Many Americans defend very harshly their god given right to own weapons. And in many states there are death penalties, even though there are usually people discontent in those states with those actions.
Every culture, every religion, has it's sets of values. Muslin don't think it is OK to kill people, in fact while the Catholic church was burning people in public square the muslin had the most advanced and tolerant civilization.
By then they had resources and a better position, much like western (Catholic) countries have now. I believe that this is not a coincidence, lack of resources and or a badly distributed richness that you see in the Arabic countries is a very good soil to plant radicals, fundamentalist and even terrorists.
If you add to that mixture a foreigner, that very few cultures see them with good eyes, that explores the main natural resource of their countries. This makes things even more easy to people like Saddam, Bin Ladden and others to recruit people to their crusades against the western cultures.
Another good example of how a suffering people can be manipulated happened after WWI, I suggest you to read how the Nazi party got into power and how the winning Europe treated Germany after they lost the first war.
Then you have a problem in how do you measure time. Time can only be measured by objects, and if all objects act the same way, faster or slower depending on gravity, speed, whatever, why should I think that all possible objects conspired to act faster or slower when is simpler changing the rate of time?
Both explanations are equaly correct and both predict the same results, on is simpler. One could say the earth is stoped at center of the universe, but then we would have a lot of complex movements in the planets to explain. If we put the sun in the center, sudenly all the planets are moving in nice and easy elipses.
Now if you is more confortable with a time that has a single rate and all the universe conspire to make it seems that this rate is changing, be my guest. I would like to see how do you would explain the fact that one event happens before, or after some other event is dependent on the point of view of the observer.
Fundamentalists are rarely peacefull and they very rarely represent the whole of his community. If you take that few that are violent and noisy and like to blow them selves up as the picture of all Muslims you are no better then those who say that "colored people are useless" or other prejudices that are so common.
Sure, and attacks on bush are very similar to attacks to your cultural heritage and your religion beliefs.
Remember that for the muslin you are forbidden to even make an image of their prophet (I believe that they are also forbidden from making any human figure, but the prophet is one step too much). Those cartoons not only commit a sin in their point of view but also made worst the stereotypes that are putting all Arabic and muslin in ghettos and cast aside from many societies.
As I said this is not responsible journalism nor an ethical action. It may be legal for him to put those cartoon in the paper, but he and the paper and even the country have to take the consequences, and protests and boycotts are good ways to say they are not happy with that disrespect.
Sure some radicals take this to another level, making those defacements, or even real world terrorism. Those I condemn.
No they are not trying to "shut down" it, they are simply saying that we should level it with a "research" that basicly says "I don't know how this work so there must be a god^W Inteligent designer". This "scientific" theory must then be taught with the same level of importance, it don't matter that it is holled and goes against what hundreds or even thousands of scietist have sweat and found for more then 140 year (the original work "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859).
In science everything, every one, is a theory, so there is no different saiyng that the gravitation is a theory or the evolution. It makes no sense trying to disqualify the knowledge with half baked statments. If there were something in those proofs that evolution is wrong, scientist would check it out. They did that for the gravitation and discovered that even time is far more confusing and works in a way that our intuition would not even conceive.
Now compare this to the cartoons that were published, they were very bad taste and they screamed prejudice, and in a way that is offensive to your religion. I wonder how would the black community would react if those were about black people, or if Israel or the international Jew community would say if those were promoting hate towards Jews?
Don't get me wrong, I am all for free speech, but as our neighborhood friend used to say, with great powers comes great responsibilities. Now do you think the power to millions of people around the world is being used with responsibility by this paper or this cartoonist?
The only problem is that all the spam do not come from the same IP. They probably com from thousands, hundred thousands zombie windows machines arround the world. The only one who will pay this tax will be real stores and real business that send you the usual opt-in mails, for instance slashdot or thinkgeek. Spamers already solved the single ip problem a long time ago.
In fact you ISP, if it has enouth users, can probably fall into this list, imagine that they send thousands of emails per second, if 1% of those are to AOL user it will be sending a rate of give or take 1 email per second to AOL. And very big providers could have peaks with much more emails per second.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't belive, if something isn't creative it will not be successfull forever. This type of incentive to monopoly of Batmans and say Sailor Moons is a incentive to the original author repeat the same old blah blah blah.
And in fact this is exactly what we see in the comic book world, the story lines are recreated regularly. And even batman and the daredevil (even more), if weren't for Frank Miller would have a very lower popularity today. The kind of recicling I was talking about do happen, in a controlled and slower way, today, since DC copies it self over and over and ocasionaly something new grabs to the character.
Also I was not saying that Joe Doe should be making a living ou of his fan fiction, all I am saying is that he should be able to create a history about batman or harry potter without fear of having to surrender all his money and live forever in debt for a big company. People should be allowed to create what ever they want, the comercial exploration of those things could be controlated.
Off course 99% of the stuff will be as bad ot worst then the official stuff... But who knows what are we loosing in the last 1%?
Comunism isn't "bad", totalitarism is. Cuba has many problems, due to the dictatorship of Castro, but many people live much better now then they would if were not for Castro and Comunism. His goverment is competent and even thougth Cuba is indeed a poor country, and big bad trade Embargo don't help. Sure he once had the backing of the USSR but he still manages to make Cuba a much better place, with the exception of guantanamo pehaps, then the neighbohood capitalism places.
Not all people must have a new iPod to be happy. Consumism is only good when you can buy, in many places, all those shinny shoes and gadgets are a form of tirany a way of separating the people who have from those who don't. This cool cell phone that many people use here is stating to the poor kid on that sell candy on the corner to be able to eat that he do not worth a damn. He's culture is not worth, and in fact many people here hate, or heted, the "carioca funk" before they found out that it was hitting in Europe.
Many people are strugling to live in my country while international bankers charge millions of dollars of interest from a debt that was already payed. We have to sell stuff for you using your dollars, just so you can inflate the market with more dolars so when we actually use those dollars the worth less then what we sold.
So capitalism is no angel of goodness. By seeing what you people are saying even your people is suffering from it. There is a growing poor class in the US that can barely live, and many factories are leaving to third world countries, even here, searching for lower costs and contributing to this growth.
Saying XYZ is evil or good is a way of oversimplifying things.
Just because somthing can be done without any knowledge of math it means that it is not math? I guess then that all criptography is done in a similar way, people use hard core cripto with their browsers almost everyday, but most of them have no idea of what is happening, so I guess those are not math either.
Just becuase somtheing is simple enouth dosen't mean it isn't math, people calculate change and it is simple and it is math. People do those criptograms in puzzle magazines and it too is math. And your hedgerow cipher is math also, it may be simple but math is not incompatible with simple as many people believe.
And you're right, quantum criptography is a encryption, but not for the reason you stated. Using quantum teleportation you can verify if something was seen by a unauthorized third party, but otherwise it is a mean of transporting information (not encription). But to use it, people will probably send a one time pad, in laymans words a bunch of random data. Since the receiver could (not anymore as it seem) verify that he was the only receiver of this particular pad, the other end could then use the pad to encode (with a simple binary xor) the plain text and send it, this could even be sended in a more usual fashion, if it is cheaper since it is encripted with a key that is as big as the message there is no way to break it since every message with the same lenght could be encoded to the same result.
One time pads are unbreakable, but they must be used only one time, you must have the same amount of key and data, and be sure to transport it securely to the other end. Those requirements, almost always make the one time pad unusable.
But you yourself is stating that google is either responsible or not for censorship. Why should google not apply to local laws in china when it does apply to USA laws even thougth many people here don't love them. Why only now start to throw stones in google.
What if google started to play the "I will protect the world against tirany" "super company" and stoped working with countries that have DMCA like laws or one of the hundreds of laws and legislations that were created to protect the Americans from the big bad terrorist that limit your civil rights? Just because a law is an "American law" it is by nature better then any other law?
Each country has a culture, a policy and a law. If you want to sell beer here in Brazil you will probably make an advertising that would feature bautiful women in tiny bikinis, and this will not shock anyone here. Meanwhile the same advertising could be seen as a pervertion by some people in other countries. Should a brasilian beer company that want to sell for those other countries use an advert that will shock people just so it can not be censored???
Sure we all disagree with the position of china's goverment and this kind of political censorship. My coutry, Brazil, was recently a target of a brutal military goverment, and we know what is to have censored papers and people disapearing and being tortured by the state because of their ideals. All the papers that were legal, had to follow the censorship, even the ones that had a more leftward position. This goverment had the backing of the USA, after all this goverment, that censored, tortured and killed people was fighting the "big bad comunist".
Bold comment, but I would say compleatly untrue. Sure if you define a story in broad terms like "a romance that is forbiden and it ends with a tragedy" you can fit a few thousand books, movies and plays into that. But only one of those is "Romeu and Juliet", would you say that all of those are the same?
I guess you will try to argue that the newer are "rip-offs" from the original. But I would say that there's no culture without "riping off". Coping and improving is what we do, and when is done well it can be good, very good. Most of the music is done in a similar way, good musitian influence the newer generation and were infuenced by big names that he used to hear when he was young.
I believe that all this race to protect every single idea that can be selled to the point that people can't replay a "buffy episode" in the comunity theather or Joseph Doe can't create a fan fiction featuring batman or maybe "batguy" is bad for the culture in general.
All that said, I would like to say that if this Joseph Doe character starts selling, or attempt to get a profit from his fan-fiction, then maybe the original authors could ask for a piece of those profits.
I know it is too late to write anything and someone actually read it... :-D but...
Nowaday I get more worried about reliability then capacity, sure changing spins in eletrons can be fun and squeeze more the one terabyte (or it would be terabibytes, whatever), but would that electron maintain that specific spin for how long? ten years? one year? two weeks?
I would buy a cd sized that would hold something like a cd, 700Mb, and would keep its data if I drove a car over it and subject it to a oven, followed by a freezer temperature. this would be cool! I want a media reliable for my backups.:-)
Ok, so I had choosen a bad example. :-) But I guess you got my point, didn't?
hahahahahhahahaha. If I could I would mod you funny, man it is rare to laught reading slashdot. :-D
The point is not that, designers that are used to work on paper know what to expect from a CMYK color. They know the amount of ink they need to get a result they thought. My wife is a designer, and I've watched her working with colors that she knew weren't quite right in the monitor or her's inkjet printer, but she knew that they would get rigth once they were printed in offset (and it worked).
Also the possibility to work with any number of color channels is very useful also, one of her covers had 3 colors (red, black and bronze) and even photoshop couldn't handle that in a workable way.
It does not have 'helper apps'? It does not start the program bittorrent when download a .torrent? Does it run a plugin when the page states it to do it, like when you enter the site 'trailers.apple.com'?
:-)
Well if it does not do any of the above I would congratulate you. But my guess is that it does many of the above, at least in it's default state. Browsers today are very complex by them selves, html, xhtml, xml, css, canvas, mathml, svg, gif, jpeg, png and others are necessary (ok some of those aren't yet necessary) to handle by the browser it self. But beyond that there is java, quicktime, WMP, mpg, mp3, ogg and many, many, many other files that people want to be able to access in a somewhat seamless way in the web.
The browser has to rely on external viewers and plugins to handle those formats, and maybe other that are yet to be invented. I only think that there should be a sandbox arround all of that, so that when shit happens (and it will) at list you are already in the litter box.
I am not saying executing the file it self. But if you download a .mp3 file does it play automaticly? It is because safari has started an external program. The browser can be very fine, but imagine that the mp3 player have a flaw that can run executables? Then someone could hide a malware into a mp3 file, but this does not concern only mp3, all the files that have 'viewers' can be affected.
:-P) was suposed to run both the browser and the helper application in a special environment, maybe something as simple as a 'nobody' user that have no rights over the real user data or even an emulated layer that have no access to anything in the computer.
:P No one is perfect. :-D
A sandbox that I was proposing, but did not write it down (so I am lazy
So I was lazy, did not specify what I meant and that was a bad post.
A sandbox for the browser would be nice. It the browser could not start any applications automaticaly, and even firefox can do this, it would certainly be more secure.
Even better, I think is not to allow direct execution from the desktop shell. If you want to execute something make a 'desktop' file pointing to it. Also don't permit desktop files to have relative URLs, if this was possible an atacker could send the .desktop file with the executable in the same compressed file.
You know what, what about companies that censor themselves so they can still be allowed to the white house press conferences? Or companies that censor themselves to not step on the advertising company's feet? Or maybe companies that are allied to some backward thinking group?
So go ahead call me a troll if you want, but I see many news agencies and papers doing much worst then google and no one talk about it. This kind of auto-censorship is being around almost always and has hidden many truths from you people (not someone who is in china), you're the affected.
Ohhh, but those censorship are OK, since they are not mandated by the government. You want my opinion, bullshit, those are not okay and are much worst then google applying to china's law. We have a saying here that goes like this "in Roma like the Romans", and that is what google is doing.
So I question, what good is free speech if no one has the guts to speak what people need to hear? What good does the law does, when there are other ways to suppress the news, by using either money or political pressures?
It is my opinion that google is doing more good by having a censored Chinese version than if it had no appearance in china at all. They are being clear that there is censorship and making it clear for the people that they are being oppressed by someone, while in the case of free speech in the western side of the world we are indeed being oppressed without anyone noticing.
They would be linear if you have no caps, since your precision is limited to a predefined range those operations are not linear. In fact those are lossy operations and could make the record sound terribly with a noticeable distortion.
But relativity don't say that the event that happened one year ago, and just now is observed, is happening now. It tells that depending on yuor point of view it may have happend simultaneosly or not to another event. What happen is that if you measure the moment of a flash (for instance) here it dosen't follow that from some other point of view the moment that you stoped your watch and the moment of the flash are simultaneous.
This is hard to grasp, but it is what happen, and some measurements that we use daily depends on those variations, for instance the GPS satelite clocks as someone else stated.
You do have a point, but those who are fanning this incidents are the radicals, and they just layed eyes on this now. But this dosen't take the fact that figuring their profet with a bomb in his head or a line of suicider bombers trying to enter the pardise are bad taste. If those were about jews, homosexuals or colored people, I would expect the same kind of reaction from the targets.
Ok I agree with you, not all fundamentalist are raging lunatics. :-P But the other point I was making is somewhat truth those raging lunatics that want to explode everything and everyone that don't think like them are rarely a good measure unit for the people they say they represent.
Do Christian Americans really believe that killing is wrong? Sure killing an American is the worst sin any one can commit, but what about muslin's or Communists before that? The USA, for as long as I can remember, was always happy to find a new war or a new enemy. And the people, maybe the radical Christian even more, aways were behind those decisions.
Many Americans defend very harshly their god given right to own weapons. And in many states there are death penalties, even though there are usually people discontent in those states with those actions.
Every culture, every religion, has it's sets of values. Muslin don't think it is OK to kill people, in fact while the Catholic church was burning people in public square the muslin had the most advanced and tolerant civilization.
By then they had resources and a better position, much like western (Catholic) countries have now. I believe that this is not a coincidence, lack of resources and or a badly distributed richness that you see in the Arabic countries is a very good soil to plant radicals, fundamentalist and even terrorists.
If you add to that mixture a foreigner, that very few cultures see them with good eyes, that explores the main natural resource of their countries. This makes things even more easy to people like Saddam, Bin Ladden and others to recruit people to their crusades against the western cultures.
Another good example of how a suffering people can be manipulated happened after WWI, I suggest you to read how the Nazi party got into power and how the winning Europe treated Germany after they lost the first war.
Then you have a problem in how do you measure time. Time can only be measured by objects, and if all objects act the same way, faster or slower depending on gravity, speed, whatever, why should I think that all possible objects conspired to act faster or slower when is simpler changing the rate of time?
Both explanations are equaly correct and both predict the same results, on is simpler. One could say the earth is stoped at center of the universe, but then we would have a lot of complex movements in the planets to explain. If we put the sun in the center, sudenly all the planets are moving in nice and easy elipses.
Now if you is more confortable with a time that has a single rate and all the universe conspire to make it seems that this rate is changing, be my guest. I would like to see how do you would explain the fact that one event happens before, or after some other event is dependent on the point of view of the observer.
Fundamentalists are rarely peacefull and they very rarely represent the whole of his community. If you take that few that are violent and noisy and like to blow them selves up as the picture of all Muslims you are no better then those who say that "colored people are useless" or other prejudices that are so common.
Sure, and attacks on bush are very similar to attacks to your cultural heritage and your religion beliefs.
Remember that for the muslin you are forbidden to even make an image of their prophet (I believe that they are also forbidden from making any human figure, but the prophet is one step too much). Those cartoons not only commit a sin in their point of view but also made worst the stereotypes that are putting all Arabic and muslin in ghettos and cast aside from many societies.
As I said this is not responsible journalism nor an ethical action. It may be legal for him to put those cartoon in the paper, but he and the paper and even the country have to take the consequences, and protests and boycotts are good ways to say they are not happy with that disrespect.
Sure some radicals take this to another level, making those defacements, or even real world terrorism. Those I condemn.
No they are not trying to "shut down" it, they are simply saying that we should level it with a "research" that basicly says "I don't know how this work so there must be a god^W Inteligent designer". This "scientific" theory must then be taught with the same level of importance, it don't matter that it is holled and goes against what hundreds or even thousands of scietist have sweat and found for more then 140 year (the original work "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859).
In science everything, every one, is a theory, so there is no different saiyng that the gravitation is a theory or the evolution. It makes no sense trying to disqualify the knowledge with half baked statments. If there were something in those proofs that evolution is wrong, scientist would check it out. They did that for the gravitation and discovered that even time is far more confusing and works in a way that our intuition would not even conceive.
Now compare this to the cartoons that were published, they were very bad taste and they screamed prejudice, and in a way that is offensive to your religion. I wonder how would the black community would react if those were about black people, or if Israel or the international Jew community would say if those were promoting hate towards Jews?
Don't get me wrong, I am all for free speech, but as our neighborhood friend used to say, with great powers comes great responsibilities. Now do you think the power to millions of people around the world is being used with responsibility by this paper or this cartoonist?
Not counting the marketing division, that some people say get a larger share of money then the research.
The only problem is that all the spam do not come from the same IP. They probably com from thousands, hundred thousands zombie windows machines arround the world. The only one who will pay this tax will be real stores and real business that send you the usual opt-in mails, for instance slashdot or thinkgeek. Spamers already solved the single ip problem a long time ago.
In fact you ISP, if it has enouth users, can probably fall into this list, imagine that they send thousands of emails per second, if 1% of those are to AOL user it will be sending a rate of give or take 1 email per second to AOL. And very big providers could have peaks with much more emails per second.