When my 9 year old daughter encountered the word in a book borrowed from the school library and asked for an explanation, it was a perfect opportunity to provide a bit of a history lesson, and an introduction to bigotry as an unfortunate negative aspect of human nature.
I prefer to use it as an opportunity to provide a bit of an etymology lesson, and an introdutction to ignorance as an unfortunate negative aspect of human nature.
That is, `nigger' is just a dialect pronunciation of `negro,' which is just the word `black.' That is its denotation; the connotation is certainly more unpleasant, and hence the word is to be avoided, but not because it itself is bad.
Well, I could also make the argument that some power of two would be a vastly superior base from a mathematical perspective.
For some things, yes. But too many fractions would end up non-terminating, and numbers would be too long (256 decimal is 100,000,000 binary). Twelve has many mathematical advantages: it is an abundant number (less than the sum of its factors); twelve spheres (no more or less) fill the space around another sphere (as six circles do another circle); it's close enough to ten that we can preserve many gut-feelings about numbers; it has a large number of factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12; 10 only has 1, 2, 5, 10).
However, no predecimal system consistently used base-twelve units. Pounds avoirdupois are base-sixteen, pounds sterling are base-twenty, subdivided by base-twelve, an Imperial pint is twenty ounces, a fathom is six feet, a mile (statute) is 1760 three-foot yards, etc.
I suspect you mean pre-French, not pre-decimal. Decimal & duodecimal are a system of counting; standard and French units are systems of measurement. Anyway, the pound of weight used to be twelve ounces (like there are twelve inches to a foot--ounce and inch are the same word), but people wanted a heftier weight-unit, so another four ounces were tacked on. Liquid measure was originally base-two, which makes much more sense than any other base (about which more below). A fathom is a half-dozen feet, which is a perfectly dozenal unit. And the mile was supposed to be 1,000 paces originally.
The beauty of our current system is that units are typically sized to something useful. An inch is handy for small work; a foot for larger work; a mile for larger work still. The Imperial pint was influenced by decimalisation--it used to be 16 (= 2^4) ounces. A fathom is measured by dropping a rope in water, and can be taken by simply measuring six-foot lengths across one's chest (similarly with the yard and the ell). None of these really need all that much relationship to one another--how often does one really convert units? That's the silliness of French units: they optimise for the uncommon case and de-optimise for the common (that is, French units are all sorts of inconvenient: does anyone really care about gigametres or decilitres?).
Plus, we have the freedom to change bases where it makes sense. Twelve makes a lot of sense for things on paper: cut in half, in half again and then in thirds. Ten sucks: cut in half, then go mad eyeballing fifths. But for liquids nothing but halving and doubling makes sense: one can pour half a glass's contents into another and get exact amounts, but thirds, fifths &c. are a pain. That's why are units go up like this: 2 ounces a jack; two jacks a gill (pron. jill), two gills a cup, two cups a pint, two pints a quart, two quarts a pottle (bottle?), two pottles a gallon, and so on doubling up to the tun of 256 gallons.
This ideal system has been changed successive madmen to the point that barrels are no longer 32 gallons &c.
Weight's another matter. I think it, too, is one where base-power-of-2 is best. But in the case of weight one can play with multi-ounce counter-weights, and so base-16 is sufficient. Note that if written in base-12, a pound is *14 oz; two pounds *28; three *40, each going up by thirds--which in base 12 would be as familiar a progression as halves in decimal (.5, 1, 1.5...).
There's really no sane reason not to switch to duodecimal, except that it would be the worst bother in the entire history of history, just about.
You have a very warped idea of what St. Constantine was up to.
Go read your history books, just a couple of weeks before the council he had half his own family executed. He was not exactly the nicest of folk.
Who is? Like all men, he was a sinner. Like some men, he was also a saint.
Constantine's objectives were purely political.
If so, why was he baptised on his deathbed, when baptism would do him no good? After all, had he believed in the pagan gods he had worshipped, he would have also believed that baptism would offend them, and lead to much unpleasantness after death.
Before that he was a follower of Sol Invictus. The political stroke of genius lay in realising that he could merge the two religions into one. That is why we have SUNday as the holy day, it was actually the holy day of Sol Invictus first.
Oh sheesh--the name of the first day of the week was changed from Sunday to Lord's Day in Latin, Greek, and every other language I know of but English. And the reason we worship on the Lord's Day is that He rose on it. He was crucified on Friday, descended into Hell on the Sabbath and arose the following day.
The Eucharist is mentioned extensively in the New Testament: everywhere St. Paul writes of thanksgiving (eucharist = thanksgiving in Greek). So what if pagans did similar things? They also sacrificed to their false gods, while Abraham, Moses &c. sacrificed to the True God.
But hey, why bother with the problems of 350AD when half the church still uses the Received version text which is based on Erasmus's hastily thrown together edition of 1515.
What are you talking about? The Church uses whatever the local bishop promulgates, in accordance with the canons of the Ecumenical Councils. Local churches sometimes have an extra book somewhere in the Old Testament--that's about it.
If by harnessing the spare cycles of grad students and sysadmins one can write an app which may be given away, then one has lower costs.
If I were funding such a university, I'd stop giving it money if I found it was giving out value rather than charging for it, while still coming to me and telling me how hungry it was for money.
Hey--the students' off-hours labour should be their own. And as to their work--perhaps the university derives more value from giving away the work than from charging from it. This is very often the case with intellectual pursuits, you know. After all, you and I are giving away our opinions because we derive more value thereby than by charging for them.
But also, I rely on the capitalistic free market to weed out ways of doing things that cost too much. The problem is that this can weed out commercial offerings (no matter how reasonably priced, no matter what quality), but nothing in commerce can weed this out (no matter what its quality).
You don't seem to be a true capitalist. A thing is worth what people are willing to pay for it--no more and no less. If people are not willing to pay $140 for a word processor, it's not worth it. If it cost $140 or more to make, then that money was wasted. Value is not constant: buggy-whip factories were once decent investments, but no longer. Free software happens to be a revolutionary technology.
This means that good products will either be killed or will never be made.
If they were good products (i.e. worth their price), people would be willing to pay for them. That people are not willing so to do proves they are not good products. A producer cannot whine that no-one wants what he produces; he should, instead, produce what people want.
Many (not all) free software advocates not only admit this, but take glee in it, as if this were the whole point.
Well, yeah--much as policemen gloat that they put hitmen out of work. If one believes that proprietary software is immoral, then obviously one is happy every time a proprietary software company goes out of business, no matter how small or large. I myself don't view things in quite such black-and-white terms--I believe that it is far better to free one's software and its users than to keep them enslaved--but I have some sympathy with the view. No-one sheds tears for an artist who cannot get anyone to purchase his statues carven of congealed horse-snot--why should anyone cry that a programmer cannot get anyone to pay him for less than what they can get for free?
I'm concerned about my injury as a consumer, not having access to the fine products these injured companies would have produced because the market has become inhospitable for people to earn an honest buck making and selling software.
Well, that's a market. It doesn't care about individuals but about society. I don't know why anyone drinks Coors, Miller or Budweiser, but people do, and those beers are cheaper than the beers I drink. If the market won't support those `fine products,' what that really means is that not enough people want them. Well, not enough people want to give me cheap computers--but that's life.
The reason that software should be free has nothing to do with privacy, or even `information wants to be free.' It has to do with the fact that the software which gives me the most value is free (not necessarily in price, but in freedom): free to read the source; free to edit the source; free to share the source. And yes, that it is often free in price is nice too. I will use proprietary software if I must, but it doesn't give me as much value. As an intelligent and rational economic actor, I choose the actions which give me the most value.
An economy--any economy exists to distribute goods. When you work, you are a producer of labour--you want to sell your labour for as much as possible, and employers want to buy it for as little as possible. The situation is exactly analogous to when you buy food, but reversed: at the grocer's you want to pay as little as possible and the grocer wants to charge as much as possible.
What people don't realise is that there is a market for everything: for homes; for apples; for chickens; for books; for clothes; and, yes, for labour. We as employees have no more right to stiff our employers as a grocer has the right to stiff his customers.
The beautiful thing about a truly free market is that it uses the greed of all to improve the lot of all. I may be greedy and want to be paid $200,000 for an hour's worth of work, but an employer can find others willing to work for rather less. He may be greedy and want to pay $30/month, but others are willing to pay more. Eventually all these different actors, eaching selfish and greed, improve the lot of all, as resources are moved from low-valued uses to high-valued uses (e.g. we use naptha, a disgusting and poisonous fluid which oozes from the ground, to make clothing, and fuel, and containers for food, and a myriad other things--naptha is oil).
The value of a thing is what people are willing to buy and sell it at. If you're willing to sell your labour for $1.50 an hour, and I'm willing to buy it for that much, then that is what your labour is worth--likewise for $150,000 a year.
However, has the drop in income for these people been matched with drops in the cost of living? I think a lot of people are seeing the simple dream of a house, a backyard, a car, and a dog evaporating before them.
No, it hasn't really. But then, a drop in the cost of living would mean a drop in what producers get paid, which would mean a further drop in income (remember, we're all producers, not just consumers: we produce our labour and sell it to the highest bidder). We really don't want to drop into that kind of cycle.
In reply to the second half of your statement, so what? No-one has a right to a home, to a backyard, to a car or a dog. They are all goods which are produced by someone else, someone who wants to get paid for his work. Maybe most people only produce enough to merit condos; maybe only to merit flats; maybe only to merit single rooms.
The fact of the matter, though, is that our quality of life over the long run is improving tremendously. We have unimaginable luxuries (I can travel in a day what used to take years; I can access more data than was held in the Library of Alexandria; I can eat fresh fruit at any time of year; I can drink wine imported from across the globe; ditto tobacco). We are in a bit of a slump now, but it's a minor jag in the midst of the trend. We--all of us--screwed up during the boom, and we--all of us--are reaping the fruits thereof.
Things'll get better. Indeec, if one is smart, they already are.
You have a very warped idea of what St. Constantine was up to. He called an Ecumenical Council to decide several issues (among them the composition of the Bible--yes, Protestants, the Church wrote the Bible!). He was an Arian (follower of Arius, a priest who denied Christ's dual nature), and yet the Council decided against him and for the truth that Christ is Man and God. Rather than force the Church to yield to his temporal power, he yielded to its spiritual authority, and accepted the dicta of the Council.
I think that when a successful commercial application exists, open source projects have no business meddling unless that commercial application is failing to address market needs at a reasonable price.
I agree. Note that by definition proprietary software (what you mean by commercial; after all, free software may also be commercial) fails to address a vital market need: that of freedom. Thus, free software has plenty of business in every market.
Open software created by people with too much time on their hands or funding that does not have to be accounted for like to believe they have created a cheaper offering, but they haven't shown me that their cost was, in fact, lower. They've just shown they don't have to care about costs.
Ummm... That means that their costs are lower. If by harnessing the spare cycles of grad students and sysadmins one can write an app which may be given away, then one has lower costs.
Doing so, and putting a commercial business out of business as a result, is nothing to be applauded or emulated. It is a failure of the paradigm and garners no respect from me.
It's not the `failure of the paradigm'; it is the paradigm. Software should be free. The free software community wants to eliminate proprietary software. This necessarily means that producers of proprietary software will need to do honest work once more. C'est la vie.
As much as I like Jabber I still use ICQ, YM, AIM & MSN to communicate with all of my friends.
You do realise that there are Jabber interfaces to those, right? Thus, you could have one free Jabber client up rather than four proprietary clients.
Finally, requiring people to compile software is not a usability plus.
Why not? What's so different between `always click on setup.exe' vs. `always type./configure && make && sudo make install'? The advantage one gets is a bit of software customised for one's chip, OS, libraries and other software. It's Not That Big a Deal.
That's nonsense. The mean and standard distribution of various measures are radically different for men and women. ISTR a figure a few years back that the women's world record for one of the track events was the minimum necessary to get on a high school boy's team. Men and women are very fundamentally different. The exceptions are not the rule; they are, in fact, exceptions. If you were to pick a firefighter at random to save your life, would you rather it be a man capable on average of carrying you, or a woman who on average cannot?
Men's and women's abilities on various scales form Gaussian (i.e. normal) distributions with radically different means and standard deviations. With strength, men's mean is higher; I am reliably informed that the reverse is true of endurance.
I can't imagine, BTW, other than sheer obstinacy, why you would consider the SI units ``insane''...
Because ten is a stupid number. If they were throwing things out, they should have thrown decimal numbering out and switched to duodecimal. Twelve is a much better base, and has historic virtues too. There are a lot of other arguments against French units (enough so that I was convinced; in my youth I was quite keen thereon): they boil down to the fact that it's something which works great on paper, but is lacking in the appropriate proportions for doing real physical work.
Re. French revolutionary calendar, plenty of references turn up on the web, emacs has an implementation, and I've seen folks actually use them in emails and Usenet posts.
Anyway, I've been semi-bigoted against the frogs since before it was fashionable:-) Actually, when I was over there I liked everyone outside of Paris. Excellent food (although not as good as the Flemish), excellent wine, excellent cheese, beautiful scenery, beautiful women: a wonderful place. Their history, though, is not the most glorious...
Sure there were a handful of standard protocols like ftp and telnet, plus the ability to have remote X sessions, but there wasn't really anything beyond that.
That was the infrastructure: you have sockets; pick an unused TCP port; design a protocol well-suited to your problem domain; write a client and a server; let a thousand flowers bloom. Now it's all web-based, which means that the client really lives on the same host as the server, and the web browser (the supposed client side) is just a presentation manager.
Rolling your own protocol really isn't that bad--after all, look at the protocols we have. They somehow seemed to take off.
Imagine if HTTP had pre-dated email. We'd all be stuck reading email in Mozilla or IE, there'd be no way to send mail to users of other mail systems and there'd be no such thing as gnus, Mailsmith, mutt &c. No thanks.
It's a small price to pay to not have to deal with having a penis!
Oddly enough, we guys are rather fond of having them and cannot imagine not wanting to have one, which is why Freud went on at such length about penis envy. I don't see what the problem is--after all, anything that lets one write one's name in the snow, or on a fence, can't be all bad, right:-)
And in return for this wonderful appendage which lets us void standing, we also don't have to worry about mood swings or pregnancy. It's a pretty good deal...
OTOH, it seems to me to be a pretty good thing that men have no desire to be women, and women no desire to be men. So apparently all's well with the world.
It's not Lamarckian evolution, but is natural selection. Take two populations: the first is subjected to tasks wherein poor spatial mapping leads to death; the second is not. Let stew for a million years. Simple selection pressure means that the first population will be better than the second at spatial mapping (and, probably, worse at other things).
Now, it's complicated by the fact that men and women are not completely seperate populations; in fact, we share most of our genetic material. But we do have different chromosomes, and we do have different hormones, and it's patently obvious from all of recorded history that men are better at some things and women are better at other--all on average, of course. The exceptions are just that: exceptions.
Yes, there were French units of time to go along with the French units of weight, length, volume &c. They did not catch on because it was so utterly obvious how wrong-headed they were. Of course, all the French units were, and remain, wrong-headed, as anyone with an objective frame of mind can see, but that's another issue.
And yet oddly enough in late 18th-century England, with no socialist schooling, the literacy rate was higher than in modern England or America. No-one has a right to schooling, but rather the right to go to school should he choose to.
Well, after years of dual-booting with Windows, Linux is the now the only thing going on my desktop, and I've gotta tell ya, I'm doing just fine (better than ever, IMHO).
Exactly. The market for desktop machines is fairly stagnant, from what I've been hearing. People are switching from Windows to Linux and from Windows to Mac OS X; no-one I know of is switching from Linux to Windows, although some are switching from Linux to Mac OS X. Slowly but surely, Windows marketshare is decreasing. It's going to take awhile, but a combination of ever-improving Unix desktops and ever-worsening Microsoft policies will drive users to the Unix world.
The real fight will be between OS X and Linux, in a dozen years or so. OS X will either lose or become free software. Apple will become a full-time hardware manufacturer, creating some of the best and prettiest `lifestyle appliances.' And free software will keep on truckin'.
Thos marks weren't at 70% or 30%, most likely: they were at 2/3 and 1/3. These are non-terminating in our half-assed decimal notation. OTOH, in duodecimal (aka dozenal) they are 0.4 and 0.8. In fact, in dozenal the only low-divisor fractions which are ugly are 1/5 and 1/10. 1/7, FWIW, works out to 0.186 exactly.
Duodecimal notation is far superior to decimal, and the world should convert to it. It won't, of course, but that makes it no less superior.
It also has the pleasing effect of revealing the ugliness inherent in French units.
Re:How about those 360K floppies?
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I wonder if he even knows what the Hell "BASIC" stands for?
Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, IIRC. For its time, it wasn't all that bad, but it frightens me that folks still use it.
I suggest you read http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,921411,00.html as someone else points out.
The Guardian's bias is well known, and its legal opinions ludicrous (note that it calls our invasion of Iraq illegal, when--for all its faults--it is patently not). I should mistrust it did it state the sky blue, grass green or clouds white and fluffy.
Even so, taking away someone's life is barely comparable to imprisoning them.
You're right: one is a few seconds of pain preceded by some minutes of terror; the other is weeks, months, years, decades of agony and misery. I believe that imprisonment is a far worse punishment than death. Were I imprisoned, I would be sorely tempted to take my own life. Even death by slow strangling would be preferable to life without freedom.
And you're wrong that being released is in any way fair compensation for being unjustly imprisoned. I would posit that it's as impossible to pay a man back for those lost years as it is to raise a corpse from the dead. Not even a million dollars for every day in prison would bring back the lost opportunities, the lost joys, the lost freedom. Although it'd certainly be nice:-)
I feel you're contradicting yourself by saying your system lets a fraction through but you would prefer dozens of guilty to go free.
You should take a statistics course, as in it you would learn that it is impossible to be 100% confident about anything. One cannot guarantee that every freed man was innocent or that every punished man was guilty, or vice-versa. You would also learn that it is possible to construct a system wherein you are exceedingly certain (say, 99.995%) that those punished are guilty--this same system would at once let many guilty men walk, and punish a few innocent men. That is to say, there is nothing contradictory in what I say; what seems so is the natural outgrowth of statistical methods.
Why should the child be forced to live a life of cruelty, poverty and misery?
Who determines what lives are worth living? May we execute the homeless, or cripples, or mental defectives, simply because you and I find their lives horrors? Of course not. Why should a mother be permitted to slay her child to prevent a horrible life, particularly when there is an easy way to both let the kid live and improve his chances (i.e. adoption).
Note that this all hinges on acceptance that conception marks the start of life, and thus that abortion is murder. Were this not the case, then there would be no legal grounds to even argue the point, as it would then be a moral issue (and hence, one I'd not legislate against--note that while I am against voluntary euthanasia, I believe it should be legal). However, there are good scientific and areligious reasons to believe that life begins at conception.
I find it macabre that you are not willing to slay a confessed and witnessed child rapist-murderer, but are willing to kill innumerable children willy-nilly. Do you realise that more have died due to abortion than due to the Holocaust? I am not certain, but very soon more will have been slain than the Communists ever killed.
Actually, there are devised techniques to create stemm and somatic cells from unfertilized embryos.
There is no such thing as an unfertilised embryo. There are unfertilised eggs, and sperm; these are called gametes. When one sperm penetrates the egg's surface, it instantly hardens to prevent any other sperm entering, and the union of the two is called a zygote. When he has multiplied enough to become a kind of ball of many undifferentiated cells, he is a blastula. When certain physical structures (e.g. the mouth and anus) have formed, he is now called an embryo. When all organs have been formed--not necessarily perfected, but begun--he is
According to the Geneva convention, anyone taken captive during a war should be treated as a POW, with no exceptions.
That is not my reading thereof. As I understand it, only lawful combatants are accorded the full protection of the Conventions (yes, there are several). If one does not abide by their terms, one is not protected thereby. In fact, unless I'm mistaken one can still execute unlawful combatants (e.g. those not in uniform, or who use hollow-point rounds or other inhumane munitions) out of hand.
Why is it better to imprison someone than kill them? Is that really a serious question?
Yes, of course. You can no more give a man a dozen years of his life back than you can give him the rest of his life back. Given that prison is an utterly vile place, it may very well be that it is better to die after a year of it than after forty years of it.
I would rather see 10 guilty people set free than 1 innocent man put to death.
Yes, of course; I'd go further yet: I'd rather see a dozen guilty men go free than a single man wrongfully imprisoned, fined, censured or humiliated. That's why our system has so many safeguards built into it: the presumption of innocence; the rules of evidence; the right to appeal; trial by jury &c. We do out absolute best to ensure that every man convicted is guilty. Obviously some fraction will be innocent, as no human process is faultless--we live in an imperfect world.
OK, you're a 13 year old girl from a broken home, with abusive parents, who gets assaulted, beaten up, and raped. You fall pregnant. Let's look at your choices. You can have the child. You can have the child and put it up for adoption. You can have an abortion.
Has the child done anything wrong? No--why then must it be put to death? The rapist did the wrong, and compounded it by forcing the poor girl to carry a child to term; he should be punished accordingly. Why should the innocent child suffer the death penalty for a crime it did not commit?
As a human being I would not like to see any life brought in to this world where it has no chance of receiving the quality of life it deserves.
That's not the case for anyone. Dave Thomas was adopted--and he did pretty well. If parents cannot or will not provide for their children, they should give them up to others, not slay them. Where, then, would you draw the line? If the mother bears her child, then loses her job and cannot afford two mouths to feed, should she strangle it? If she finds a wonderful man who wants only two children when she has three, may she euthanise one so that the other two have a better life?
Murder is not as black and white as you make out--I'd consider abortion to more akin to euthenasia--sparing someone from an unnecessary low quality of life.
How big of one, to kill another because one thinks his life is of unnecessarily low quality.
I'm sure if it was your daughter, or you, you wouldn't feel that it was illegal--or at least that it should be illegal.
I hope that I am never a hypocrite.
Legality does not supercede any form of sensible logic, and if something is not moral, it should not be legal.
There are a lot of things I believe are or may be immoral: polygamy; drug use; extramarital sex. I also firmly believe that they should be legal. Who decides what is or is not moral? The law is a powerful weapon, and should only be used when one man harms another: it should punish rape, theft, murder, fraud and not a whole lot else. I don't want you telling me that I cannot live according to the precepts of my religion; nor do I want to tell you that you cannot live according to the precepts of your philosophy.
If you were put in the situation that one of those people find themselves in (as I tried to give examples of), and you would be perfectly happy with what they would have to face/put up with, then that is fine.
The free market is a wonderful mechanism to determine this: if there's a lot of demand for something, then folks will see a lot of money to be made there.
No, the free market will direct research towards the drugs that are profitable, not where there is a great humanitarian demand. For example, if AIDS is mostly an African problem, then nobody will be researching AIDS drugs because Africans cannot afford expensive drugs.
That's exactly my point: those Africans do not produce enough value to be able to persuade the rest of the world to produce those drugs; thus they will not be produced. That's fair and just.
Now, we who are well-off do have a moral duty to be charitable. However, as with everything moral, said duty is most certainly not a fitting subject for legislation.
First off, the free market is only good for determining how much money something is worth, not for determining how much society will benefit from something.
The two are the same. A thing is not worthwhile if men will not pay for it; as a corollary, a thing has value proportional to how much men will pay for it. The market price of a good is what it's worth.
And to answer the firts point, the same way everything else in public policy is done, the people*[sic] decide what drugs are to be researched.
And how does one insure that those are the proper drugs to be researching? We are, after all, talking about ignorami. A drug's profits are proportional to its value; therefor, an exceedingly profitable drug is of great value to society. No one--not me, not you, nor anyone else save God--is qualified to judge how valuable anything is for everyone at large. The market, though, is the product of every single economic actor's input: it is the only thing which can possibly reflect the value of a good.
And yes, that means that a headache cure useful to billions may be of more value than a cure for a disease suffered by tens. How could it be otherwise?
Why do you think the US has what is generally regarded to be one of the worst health care systems in the first world, and the most expensive drugs?
Nonsense. Our medical care is the finest in the world. It is not, however, subsidised: you can only purchase as much as you can afford. There is a difference.
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I prefer to use it as an opportunity to provide a bit of an etymology lesson, and an introdutction to ignorance as an unfortunate negative aspect of human nature.
That is, `nigger' is just a dialect pronunciation of `negro,' which is just the word `black.' That is its denotation; the connotation is certainly more unpleasant, and hence the word is to be avoided, but not because it itself is bad.
For some things, yes. But too many fractions would end up non-terminating, and numbers would be too long (256 decimal is 100,000,000 binary). Twelve has many mathematical advantages: it is an abundant number (less than the sum of its factors); twelve spheres (no more or less) fill the space around another sphere (as six circles do another circle); it's close enough to ten that we can preserve many gut-feelings about numbers; it has a large number of factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12; 10 only has 1, 2, 5, 10).
I suspect you mean pre-French, not pre-decimal. Decimal & duodecimal are a system of counting; standard and French units are systems of measurement. Anyway, the pound of weight used to be twelve ounces (like there are twelve inches to a foot--ounce and inch are the same word), but people wanted a heftier weight-unit, so another four ounces were tacked on. Liquid measure was originally base-two, which makes much more sense than any other base (about which more below). A fathom is a half-dozen feet, which is a perfectly dozenal unit. And the mile was supposed to be 1,000 paces originally.
The beauty of our current system is that units are typically sized to something useful. An inch is handy for small work; a foot for larger work; a mile for larger work still. The Imperial pint was influenced by decimalisation--it used to be 16 (= 2^4) ounces. A fathom is measured by dropping a rope in water, and can be taken by simply measuring six-foot lengths across one's chest (similarly with the yard and the ell). None of these really need all that much relationship to one another--how often does one really convert units? That's the silliness of French units: they optimise for the uncommon case and de-optimise for the common (that is, French units are all sorts of inconvenient: does anyone really care about gigametres or decilitres?).
Plus, we have the freedom to change bases where it makes sense. Twelve makes a lot of sense for things on paper: cut in half, in half again and then in thirds. Ten sucks: cut in half, then go mad eyeballing fifths. But for liquids nothing but halving and doubling makes sense: one can pour half a glass's contents into another and get exact amounts, but thirds, fifths &c. are a pain. That's why are units go up like this: 2 ounces a jack; two jacks a gill (pron. jill), two gills a cup, two cups a pint, two pints a quart, two quarts a pottle (bottle?), two pottles a gallon, and so on doubling up to the tun of 256 gallons.
This ideal system has been changed successive madmen to the point that barrels are no longer 32 gallons &c.
Weight's another matter. I think it, too, is one where base-power-of-2 is best. But in the case of weight one can play with multi-ounce counter-weights, and so base-16 is sufficient. Note that if written in base-12, a pound is *14 oz; two pounds *28; three *40, each going up by thirds--which in base 12 would be as familiar a progression as halves in decimal (.5, 1, 1.5...).
There's really no sane reason not to switch to duodecimal, except that it would be the worst bother in the entire history of history, just about.
Who is? Like all men, he was a sinner. Like some men, he was also a saint.
If so, why was he baptised on his deathbed, when baptism would do him no good? After all, had he believed in the pagan gods he had worshipped, he would have also believed that baptism would offend them, and lead to much unpleasantness after death.
Oh sheesh--the name of the first day of the week was changed from Sunday to Lord's Day in Latin, Greek, and every other language I know of but English. And the reason we worship on the Lord's Day is that He rose on it. He was crucified on Friday, descended into Hell on the Sabbath and arose the following day.
The Eucharist is mentioned extensively in the New Testament: everywhere St. Paul writes of thanksgiving (eucharist = thanksgiving in Greek). So what if pagans did similar things? They also sacrificed to their false gods, while Abraham, Moses &c. sacrificed to the True God.
What are you talking about? The Church uses whatever the local bishop promulgates, in accordance with the canons of the Ecumenical Councils. Local churches sometimes have an extra book somewhere in the Old Testament--that's about it.
What people don't realise is that there is a market for everything: for homes; for apples; for chickens; for books; for clothes; and, yes, for labour. We as employees have no more right to stiff our employers as a grocer has the right to stiff his customers.
The beautiful thing about a truly free market is that it uses the greed of all to improve the lot of all. I may be greedy and want to be paid $200,000 for an hour's worth of work, but an employer can find others willing to work for rather less. He may be greedy and want to pay $30/month, but others are willing to pay more. Eventually all these different actors, eaching selfish and greed, improve the lot of all, as resources are moved from low-valued uses to high-valued uses (e.g. we use naptha, a disgusting and poisonous fluid which oozes from the ground, to make clothing, and fuel, and containers for food, and a myriad other things--naptha is oil).
The value of a thing is what people are willing to buy and sell it at. If you're willing to sell your labour for $1.50 an hour, and I'm willing to buy it for that much, then that is what your labour is worth--likewise for $150,000 a year.
No, it hasn't really. But then, a drop in the cost of living would mean a drop in what producers get paid, which would mean a further drop in income (remember, we're all producers, not just consumers: we produce our labour and sell it to the highest bidder). We really don't want to drop into that kind of cycle.
In reply to the second half of your statement, so what? No-one has a right to a home, to a backyard, to a car or a dog. They are all goods which are produced by someone else, someone who wants to get paid for his work. Maybe most people only produce enough to merit condos; maybe only to merit flats; maybe only to merit single rooms.
The fact of the matter, though, is that our quality of life over the long run is improving tremendously. We have unimaginable luxuries (I can travel in a day what used to take years; I can access more data than was held in the Library of Alexandria; I can eat fresh fruit at any time of year; I can drink wine imported from across the globe; ditto tobacco). We are in a bit of a slump now, but it's a minor jag in the midst of the trend. We--all of us--screwed up during the boom, and we--all of us--are reaping the fruits thereof.
Things'll get better. Indeec, if one is smart, they already are.
You have a very warped idea of what St. Constantine was up to. He called an Ecumenical Council to decide several issues (among them the composition of the Bible--yes, Protestants, the Church wrote the Bible!). He was an Arian (follower of Arius, a priest who denied Christ's dual nature), and yet the Council decided against him and for the truth that Christ is Man and God. Rather than force the Church to yield to his temporal power, he yielded to its spiritual authority, and accepted the dicta of the Council.
I agree. Note that by definition proprietary software (what you mean by commercial; after all, free software may also be commercial) fails to address a vital market need: that of freedom. Thus, free software has plenty of business in every market.
Open software created by people with too much time on their hands or funding that does not have to be accounted for like to believe they have created a cheaper offering, but they haven't shown me that their cost was, in fact, lower. They've just shown they don't have to care about costs.
Ummm... That means that their costs are lower. If by harnessing the spare cycles of grad students and sysadmins one can write an app which may be given away, then one has lower costs.
Doing so, and putting a commercial business out of business as a result, is nothing to be applauded or emulated. It is a failure of the paradigm and garners no respect from me.
It's not the `failure of the paradigm'; it is the paradigm. Software should be free. The free software community wants to eliminate proprietary software. This necessarily means that producers of proprietary software will need to do honest work once more. C'est la vie.
You do realise that there are Jabber interfaces to those, right? Thus, you could have one free Jabber client up rather than four proprietary clients.
Finally, requiring people to compile software is not a usability plus.
Why not? What's so different between `always click on setup.exe' vs. `always type ./configure && make && sudo make install'? The advantage one gets is a bit of software customised for one's chip, OS, libraries and other software. It's Not That Big a Deal.
Men's and women's abilities on various scales form Gaussian (i.e. normal) distributions with radically different means and standard deviations. With strength, men's mean is higher; I am reliably informed that the reverse is true of endurance.
We're different--it's not a big deal.
Because ten is a stupid number. If they were throwing things out, they should have thrown decimal numbering out and switched to duodecimal. Twelve is a much better base, and has historic virtues too. There are a lot of other arguments against French units (enough so that I was convinced; in my youth I was quite keen thereon): they boil down to the fact that it's something which works great on paper, but is lacking in the appropriate proportions for doing real physical work.
Re. French revolutionary calendar, plenty of references turn up on the web, emacs has an implementation, and I've seen folks actually use them in emails and Usenet posts.
Anyway, I've been semi-bigoted against the frogs since before it was fashionable:-) Actually, when I was over there I liked everyone outside of Paris. Excellent food (although not as good as the Flemish), excellent wine, excellent cheese, beautiful scenery, beautiful women: a wonderful place. Their history, though, is not the most glorious...
That was the infrastructure: you have sockets; pick an unused TCP port; design a protocol well-suited to your problem domain; write a client and a server; let a thousand flowers bloom. Now it's all web-based, which means that the client really lives on the same host as the server, and the web browser (the supposed client side) is just a presentation manager.
Rolling your own protocol really isn't that bad--after all, look at the protocols we have. They somehow seemed to take off.
Imagine if HTTP had pre-dated email. We'd all be stuck reading email in Mozilla or IE, there'd be no way to send mail to users of other mail systems and there'd be no such thing as gnus, Mailsmith, mutt &c. No thanks.
Frightfully insane--just as insane as the units they invented, but thankfully less popular.
Oddly enough, we guys are rather fond of having them and cannot imagine not wanting to have one, which is why Freud went on at such length about penis envy. I don't see what the problem is--after all, anything that lets one write one's name in the snow, or on a fence, can't be all bad, right:-)
And in return for this wonderful appendage which lets us void standing, we also don't have to worry about mood swings or pregnancy. It's a pretty good deal...
OTOH, it seems to me to be a pretty good thing that men have no desire to be women, and women no desire to be men. So apparently all's well with the world.
Now, it's complicated by the fact that men and women are not completely seperate populations; in fact, we share most of our genetic material. But we do have different chromosomes, and we do have different hormones, and it's patently obvious from all of recorded history that men are better at some things and women are better at other--all on average, of course. The exceptions are just that: exceptions.
Yes, there were French units of time to go along with the French units of weight, length, volume &c. They did not catch on because it was so utterly obvious how wrong-headed they were. Of course, all the French units were, and remain, wrong-headed, as anyone with an objective frame of mind can see, but that's another issue.
And yet oddly enough in late 18th-century England, with no socialist schooling, the literacy rate was higher than in modern England or America. No-one has a right to schooling, but rather the right to go to school should he choose to.
Exactly. The market for desktop machines is fairly stagnant, from what I've been hearing. People are switching from Windows to Linux and from Windows to Mac OS X; no-one I know of is switching from Linux to Windows, although some are switching from Linux to Mac OS X. Slowly but surely, Windows marketshare is decreasing. It's going to take awhile, but a combination of ever-improving Unix desktops and ever-worsening Microsoft policies will drive users to the Unix world.
The real fight will be between OS X and Linux, in a dozen years or so. OS X will either lose or become free software. Apple will become a full-time hardware manufacturer, creating some of the best and prettiest `lifestyle appliances.' And free software will keep on truckin'.
Which is exactly where RedHat and metacity seem to be headed. Bleargh...
Duodecimal notation is far superior to decimal, and the world should convert to it. It won't, of course, but that makes it no less superior.
It also has the pleasing effect of revealing the ugliness inherent in French units.
Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, IIRC. For its time, it wasn't all that bad, but it frightens me that folks still use it.
The Guardian's bias is well known, and its legal opinions ludicrous (note that it calls our invasion of Iraq illegal, when--for all its faults--it is patently not). I should mistrust it did it state the sky blue, grass green or clouds white and fluffy.
Even so, taking away someone's life is barely comparable to imprisoning them.
You're right: one is a few seconds of pain preceded by some minutes of terror; the other is weeks, months, years, decades of agony and misery. I believe that imprisonment is a far worse punishment than death. Were I imprisoned, I would be sorely tempted to take my own life. Even death by slow strangling would be preferable to life without freedom.
And you're wrong that being released is in any way fair compensation for being unjustly imprisoned. I would posit that it's as impossible to pay a man back for those lost years as it is to raise a corpse from the dead. Not even a million dollars for every day in prison would bring back the lost opportunities, the lost joys, the lost freedom. Although it'd certainly be nice:-)
I feel you're contradicting yourself by saying your system lets a fraction through but you would prefer dozens of guilty to go free.
You should take a statistics course, as in it you would learn that it is impossible to be 100% confident about anything. One cannot guarantee that every freed man was innocent or that every punished man was guilty, or vice-versa. You would also learn that it is possible to construct a system wherein you are exceedingly certain (say, 99.995%) that those punished are guilty--this same system would at once let many guilty men walk, and punish a few innocent men. That is to say, there is nothing contradictory in what I say; what seems so is the natural outgrowth of statistical methods.
Why should the child be forced to live a life of cruelty, poverty and misery?
Who determines what lives are worth living? May we execute the homeless, or cripples, or mental defectives, simply because you and I find their lives horrors? Of course not. Why should a mother be permitted to slay her child to prevent a horrible life, particularly when there is an easy way to both let the kid live and improve his chances (i.e. adoption).
Note that this all hinges on acceptance that conception marks the start of life, and thus that abortion is murder. Were this not the case, then there would be no legal grounds to even argue the point, as it would then be a moral issue (and hence, one I'd not legislate against--note that while I am against voluntary euthanasia, I believe it should be legal). However, there are good scientific and areligious reasons to believe that life begins at conception.
I find it macabre that you are not willing to slay a confessed and witnessed child rapist-murderer, but are willing to kill innumerable children willy-nilly. Do you realise that more have died due to abortion than due to the Holocaust? I am not certain, but very soon more will have been slain than the Communists ever killed.
Actually, there are devised techniques to create stemm and somatic cells from unfertilized embryos.
There is no such thing as an unfertilised embryo. There are unfertilised eggs, and sperm; these are called gametes. When one sperm penetrates the egg's surface, it instantly hardens to prevent any other sperm entering, and the union of the two is called a zygote. When he has multiplied enough to become a kind of ball of many undifferentiated cells, he is a blastula. When certain physical structures (e.g. the mouth and anus) have formed, he is now called an embryo. When all organs have been formed--not necessarily perfected, but begun--he is
That is not my reading thereof. As I understand it, only lawful combatants are accorded the full protection of the Conventions (yes, there are several). If one does not abide by their terms, one is not protected thereby. In fact, unless I'm mistaken one can still execute unlawful combatants (e.g. those not in uniform, or who use hollow-point rounds or other inhumane munitions) out of hand.
Why is it better to imprison someone than kill them? Is that really a serious question?
Yes, of course. You can no more give a man a dozen years of his life back than you can give him the rest of his life back. Given that prison is an utterly vile place, it may very well be that it is better to die after a year of it than after forty years of it.
I would rather see 10 guilty people set free than 1 innocent man put to death.
Yes, of course; I'd go further yet: I'd rather see a dozen guilty men go free than a single man wrongfully imprisoned, fined, censured or humiliated. That's why our system has so many safeguards built into it: the presumption of innocence; the rules of evidence; the right to appeal; trial by jury &c. We do out absolute best to ensure that every man convicted is guilty. Obviously some fraction will be innocent, as no human process is faultless--we live in an imperfect world.
OK, you're a 13 year old girl from a broken home, with abusive parents, who gets assaulted, beaten up, and raped. You fall pregnant. Let's look at your choices. You can have the child. You can have the child and put it up for adoption. You can have an abortion.
Has the child done anything wrong? No--why then must it be put to death? The rapist did the wrong, and compounded it by forcing the poor girl to carry a child to term; he should be punished accordingly. Why should the innocent child suffer the death penalty for a crime it did not commit?
As a human being I would not like to see any life brought in to this world where it has no chance of receiving the quality of life it deserves.
That's not the case for anyone. Dave Thomas was adopted--and he did pretty well. If parents cannot or will not provide for their children, they should give them up to others, not slay them. Where, then, would you draw the line? If the mother bears her child, then loses her job and cannot afford two mouths to feed, should she strangle it? If she finds a wonderful man who wants only two children when she has three, may she euthanise one so that the other two have a better life?
Murder is not as black and white as you make out--I'd consider abortion to more akin to euthenasia--sparing someone from an unnecessary low quality of life.
How big of one, to kill another because one thinks his life is of unnecessarily low quality.
I'm sure if it was your daughter, or you, you wouldn't feel that it was illegal--or at least that it should be illegal.
I hope that I am never a hypocrite.
Legality does not supercede any form of sensible logic, and if something is not moral, it should not be legal.
There are a lot of things I believe are or may be immoral: polygamy; drug use; extramarital sex. I also firmly believe that they should be legal. Who decides what is or is not moral? The law is a powerful weapon, and should only be used when one man harms another: it should punish rape, theft, murder, fraud and not a whole lot else. I don't want you telling me that I cannot live according to the precepts of my religion; nor do I want to tell you that you cannot live according to the precepts of your philosophy.
If you were put in the situation that one of those people find themselves in (as I tried to give examples of), and you would be perfectly happy with what they would have to face/put up with, then that is fine.
I wo
That's exactly my point: those Africans do not produce enough value to be able to persuade the rest of the world to produce those drugs; thus they will not be produced. That's fair and just.
Now, we who are well-off do have a moral duty to be charitable. However, as with everything moral, said duty is most certainly not a fitting subject for legislation.
The two are the same. A thing is not worthwhile if men will not pay for it; as a corollary, a thing has value proportional to how much men will pay for it. The market price of a good is what it's worth.
And to answer the firts point, the same way everything else in public policy is done, the people*[sic] decide what drugs are to be researched.
And how does one insure that those are the proper drugs to be researching? We are, after all, talking about ignorami. A drug's profits are proportional to its value; therefor, an exceedingly profitable drug is of great value to society. No one--not me, not you, nor anyone else save God--is qualified to judge how valuable anything is for everyone at large. The market, though, is the product of every single economic actor's input: it is the only thing which can possibly reflect the value of a good.
And yes, that means that a headache cure useful to billions may be of more value than a cure for a disease suffered by tens. How could it be otherwise?
Why do you think the US has what is generally regarded to be one of the worst health care systems in the first world, and the most expensive drugs?
Nonsense. Our medical care is the finest in the world. It is not, however, subsidised: you can only purchase as much as you can afford. There is a difference.