Hmmmm... The Bible is hardly Western - it's
distinctively West Asian. And I don't
think either the original writers or those who produced the King James translation have that much in common with modern free software developers.
The New Solar System (Cambridge Uni Press 1999) has a chapter on Pluto, Triton (Neptune's satellite), and Charon (Pluto's satellite). Some quotes:
The similarities between Triton and Pluto are too close to ignore: they have comparable sizes, bulk densities, surface compositions, temperatures, and
heliocentric distances (at least when Pluto is near perihelion).
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However they came to be, we suspect that Triton and Pluto have something of a shared past. On the basis of their physical similarities and their proximity to the Kuiper belt, Trion and the Pluto-Charon binary are ever-more frequently being regarded as very large members of the Kuiper belt. Pluto's status as a planet is thus challenged. However, because it was found as a result of a search for a new planet, and because it has been called one for almost 70 years, Pluto will probably retain the traditional designation for the indefinite future - at least in the minds of most of us.
It's actually quite interesting that the
fundamentalists get so worked up about
evolutionary biology, but rarely if ever attempt
to have the biblical
Tower of Babel story taught in school language
classes, instead of standard historical linguistics.
Pennock discusses this a little in his book
Tower of Babel.
The presence of correlations other than
those studied is besides the point. (And
such no study can cover everything.)
There are serious methodological issues in such studies, but anyone claiming this is "bad science"
based on that abstract needs to go away and read
some epidemiology.
A good survey of the solar system's bodies and
their composition and surfaces is The New Solar System. This has a good chapter on Ganymede and Callisto.
There are occasional glitches in Google's
database rebuilds... for about 15 hours yesterday,
my page http://dannyreviews.com/s/sex.html was in the top ten results for a Google search on "sex" - that was great for traffic!
Unfortunately the database seems to have returned to normal, and that page is now at number 26 for "sex" - still a reasonable traffic generator.
If fines are meant to deter traffic offences,
then a $100 fine is no deterrent to anyone with a lot of money. Heck, they may just think of
it as "an expensive parking spot" or "a speed toll". And if fines are meant to be punitive,
a $100 fine is no punishment at all to someone with enough money.
One possibility is for fines to actually be assessed through the tax system, but that might not work since the very rich often pay little or no tax.
In Australia the Federal
1999 Broadcasting Services Act has attracted
most of the attention, but individual states
have either passed legislation covering the
Net (Victoria, Western Australia) or are
proposing to (South Australia).
We had something similar in Australia.
Someone registered fuck.com.au, which was fully
consistent with the guidelines - three weeks
later the domain was deregistered, and the guidelines were retrospectively modified. See
the Electronic Frontiers Australia press release for details.
Unfortunately "perfect coding" here requires
strong-AI - human level intelligence. It's
not going to happen any time soon, and when it
does happen, are we going to want to let sentient
AIs decide what our children can read?
Ok, so it's ancient history, but some of
the reasons the French think differently about
this kind of thing go back further than the
Second World War. The absolutist tradition of
the Ancient Regime contributed more to modern French political thought than is sometimes accepted. See The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and The Declaration of Rights of 1789 for an interesting book on the subject.
They're not intentionally trying to screw over their customers -
their job is to make absolutely sure that no user of their software can access inappropriate
material. They do a good job at that
They don't, actually. As well as overblocking (blocking sites most users wouldn't want or expect to be blocked), these products all underblock as well, allowing a sizeable amount of "bad stuff" through.
I can remember playing netrek on US servers in the early 90s. The best latency we ever got was around 200ms to West Coast servers - that was when the first fiber came online, but before there was enough use to saturate it. Now
I get around 300ms to vangogh.berkeley.edu (that and andrew.cmu.edu are the machines I still use for overseas connectivity testing - vangogh was one of the famous machines from the Berkeley CSRG, while CMU hosted bronco, then the world's leading netrek server).
We used to joke about netrek being a network testing tool - it was one of the first real-time multiplayer Net games.
Those were the days (even if Australia did get thrashed by CMU playing with 750ms satellite lag on an Australian server).
When I visit the Hotlinks site, I get a blank page. Oh, another clueless site that assumes everyone wants to enable Javascript and be bombarded with popup windows and other junk.
Slashdot Mirror
This provides some solid information.
Danny.
Danny.
.
Danny.
Pennock discusses this a little in his book Tower of Babel .
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Unfortunately the database seems to have returned to normal, and that page is now at number 26 for "sex" - still a reasonable traffic generator.
Danny.
If fines are meant to deter traffic offences, then a $100 fine is no deterrent to anyone with a lot of money. Heck, they may just think of it as "an expensive parking spot" or "a speed toll". And if fines are meant to be punitive, a $100 fine is no punishment at all to someone with enough money.
One possibility is for fines to actually be assessed through the tax system, but that might not work since the very rich often pay little or no tax.
Danny.
For more information and links see my anti-censorship site.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
Danny.
We used to joke about netrek being a network testing tool - it was one of the first real-time multiplayer Net games.
Those were the days (even if Australia did get thrashed by CMU playing with 750ms satellite lag on an Australian server).
Danny (ICMP Redirect).
Danny, who still prefers Netscape 3.04
Then of course there's the article Against Intellectual Property by Australian academic Brian Martin (which was a /. article a few months back).
Danny.
BTW, registration annoys me sufficiently that I never link to pages/sites that require it. Danny.
Danny.
Danny.