Someone really needs to form a label called "half a buck" or "50 cents" that offers artists exactly half of all procedes, without any packaging arm-waving or any other nonsense. Half. Period. It would have to be a popular option.
I don't know what definition you have for "quality of a society", but most of the rest of us think that DEATH "erodes the quality of life" a wee bit more than rape.
Again, I don't think you can make that statement in a vacuum, and you have to look at the statistics. If radically more people who are raped commit suicide than people who are not, clearly the experts (those who have been raped) disagree with you.
Still, quality of society as a general concept has nothing to do with the quality of life of the individual. For example, I might be misserable, but as long as that missery is not widespread and I don't impose it on others, that's not a society-impacting event.
On the other hand, if everyone walks around wondering if they'll be raped or killed, that's not a happy place to live. I'm not sure that there's any qualitative difference between the society where everyone thinks they'll be raped vs. the one where they think they'll be murdered.
Now take that and apply it to the concept of punishing crime. Why would you punish one crime more than another if they do equal damage to society (not as an individual act, but as a signpost on the road between Escape from New York and the perfect eutopia)? If so, why? What end does that serve?
Typically, such work is farmed out in small chunks with specific milestones that are measurable.
That there was one prime on the whole FBI system seems to me to be a fatal flaw, and I have to wonder if this project was ever expected to bear fruit, or if it was just a none-too-subtle attempt to point out what some administrator considered to be a broken process or foolish expectations.
There are places where having greek letters on the keyboard would be vastly useful.
The question you have to ask yourself is: what should the default consumer keyboard have? IMHO, caps lock isn't valuable enough to make the cut. Certainly folks who need one should have the ability to add one (by making whatever OS-specific changes people currently make to map something else to caps-lock, or by using a keyboard-specific technique, like the one I use on my Kinesis keyboard).
Personally, I'd think that control, escape or meta (yes, a real meta, not alt) should go ther, but that's just me.
Here's a simple acid test for you: how many rape victims, one year later, would rather have been murdered? If they're equivalent, wouldn't most of those rape victims say that death would have been no worse a fate?
I'm not sure that that holds water (especially given the radically increased suicide rate among rape victims), but let's say that it's fine. Even then I'm not sure that it matters.
We do not punish someone in order to "balance" a crime. We punish someone in order to maintain a society in which we would wish to live. This is the fundamental reason for the rule of law. All I'm saying is that rape erodes the quality of a society every bit as much as murder, and thus the law should remove that threat in exactly the same way. This cannot be said of, for example, theft.
are you seriously saying that as a teen you had as little control of your actions due to being horny as if you were 'seeing-red' angry?
There are degrees of both rage and lust. When someone taunts me, I'm able to control myself. If someone killed a family member, I'm not sure that I could. When I see someone that I find attractive, I might have trouble introducing myself, but I'm not going to lunge at them either. On the other hand, if I was getting "hot and heavy" with someone who suddenly said "stop", it was an enourmous effort of will to do so. I can easily see myself in a situation as a teenager where I did something that both my partner and I would have regretted, and when it came to sex, I was one of the more enlightened and gentle of my peers... I'm not condoning rape, but at the same time, I can very much understand WHY date rape happens in so many cases. The idea that "no means no" is incomprehensible when your body is screaming "yes".
That said, I have no sympathy for someone who simply thinks that "no" means "yes" and tries to justify their actions as consensual... mostly. That's not what I'm talking about, here, I'm talking about someone doing something in the heat of the moment that, when their head is clearer, they are going to regret.
As with many such topics, I just wish we could have a more open and honest conversation about this as a society, and decide why we're punishing someone. Is it to ease the pain of the victim, or to remove a threat from society? If it's the former, then it's impossible to draw a distinction based on premeditation. If it's the latter, then it's very possible to make such a distinction.
With regards to this, and another statement you made about unwanted advances. You have to be a female.
The picture of me on my Web site is meant to be humorous, but I think it does as good a job of establishing my gender as any picutre I'm going to let hit the net;-)
The majority of males out there, welcome just about any sexual advance.
Once again, with people making statements like that, can you imagine the utter shame and horror that a man or boy would suffer, having to admit that a) they didn't want to have sex b) a woman forced them to and c) they feel there should be some sort of action taken as a result. Many men, and I suspect a much greater number of boys, would rather die than admit anything of the sort. It's not manly, and the BEST to come out of it would be if people thought you were queer, and in many circles THAT is as good as being dead.
Besides, you know you can't say anything because everyone's just going to say what you've been saying in this discussion... come on, you know you wanted it.
if they're truly NOT interested in a woman, he's not going to get an erection....and I don't see how it is physically possible for a female to rape a male
Side note: you might just want to stop now. You're personifying a rather ugly stereotype.
No, sex doesn't have to involve penetration (shock!) and yes, it's rape if unwanted sexual activity is forced on a person, regardless of what gets probed by what and/or who gets off.
And I hate to break it to you, but there are several ways to give a man, especially a young man, an erection even if he's disgusted by what's being done to him. For reference material, see any good reference on natual studding (that is, animal breeding where artificial insemination is not involved). The erection is NOT a voluntary reflex.
A rape, yes, hideous, horrible, and can scar for life. Murder...END OF LIFE, you can't be scarred for life, you can't go to therapy, you can't recover from MURDER...you go to a dirt nap, and that is that, no questions, no options.
And many victims of rape have commited suicide as a direct result of feeling that death was a preferable state. By your reasoning, torture is less reprehensible than murder, and I cannot agree. Torture is a purely sociopathic act which is made no less heinous for being left alive at the end (in some cases).
As for degrees of rape, I'd say maybe there could be...male to female rape is bad, but, is based on normal sexual penetrations. Male to male rape? I'd say it was worse as it is not based on normal, societal and natural sexual penetration, and I'd almost guess it would scar a male victim worse than a female one, especially with all the 'gay' connitations?
Would you really want to go into that one above? A big can of worms there for degrees of rape I think.
Not at all, and I'd certainly disagree with your assessment. I'm guessing that you're fairly young, and if so, I can accept this comment in the way in which it was intended. However, consider that an unwilling target of sexual advances is unwilling regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. The impact to the victim is the concern, and no, male-male rape is not always more traumatic than any particular other combination.
I didn't put female to male rape....'cause you can't rape the willing...
Can you imagine how traumatic it must be to be the victim of such a rape? Not only do you have to live with the memory of it, but if you tell someone, they're going to act as if you should have enjoyed it. It's exactly as bad as telling a woman that she should have enjoyed being raped by a man (or woman for that matter).
No means no, regardless of what type anatomy the person saying it (or ignoring it) happens to possess. I was only discussing premeditation, not further consideration for the imapct of the crime (which is already largely accounted for).
Couple of flaws there: first, a large fraction of rapes (I'm not sure of the count) are not mechanically successful. The complexity argument flies out the window at that point. If such "incomplete" rapes were classified differently, then I would agree with your view, but not as it stands.
Also, I recall that my reactions to arrousal have changed over the years. When I was a teenager, I think I would have disagreed with your notion that one was less reason-imparing than the other. NOW, that's certianly the case, but I'm also more than twice the age I was then.
So... Scientists can't explain how the universe works, without appealing to a mysterious phenomenon they can't observe and whose nature they cannot describe except in terms of its supposed secondary effects?
And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?
I should think that would be obvious enough, but if you need an analogy, here's one:
A man walks into a dark room and stumbles over a chair. The chair bumps into something and there is a sound of something shattering.
Scenario 1: The man designates the "something" as "the glass ball", knowing full well that it may be neither glass, nor a ball. This is a way to talk about it with others. A placeholder, nothing more.
Scenario 2: The man asserts that there was a blue, Mexican blown glass ball on a table next to the chair, and that the blue ball was placed there my an older woman who will now want exactly $20.50 to replace it. Further the man asserts that anyone who claims that the ball was red is obviously wrong and their children should not be allowed to play with the children of such deviants.
Do you see the difference between the abitrary labels used as placeholders for observational gaps and religious dogma now? There's also the fact that there's math that suggests that dark matter exists, but that's actually a bit of a side point.
Also: keep in mind that dark matter is like a gap in current theory. If theory is revised in such a way as to narrow that gap to zero, then the need for the placeholder goes away, and everyone's happy.
To be fair, many would argue that rape and murder are on-par because of the long-term trauma that most people suffer as a result of rape. Certainly they are both violent crimes which any sane society takes a very firm stand against, so I'm not sure why jail time should differ between them. The thing that I've always had a problem with is that there are degrees of murder, but not of rape. Granted, it's much harder to commit rape by accident, but in murder cases, there is the concept of premeditation, and the law recognizes a premeditated murder as a distinct sort of crime.
The real problem between those is that we're recognizing the power of rage to erase reason, but not of lust. That seems... uneven.
Iraq is not a problem. See, that's exactly the point, here. Violence *does* solve problems, and often it solves problems that you don't want solved any other way (you could have solved the problem of Hitler's agression by signing over the world to him, for example... no, you wanted violence in that case -- lots of violence).
Iraq, however, is the application of violence to the "problem" of a son's sense of disgrace over his father's (mis)handling of foreign policy. That's not a problem that can actually be solved by the application of violence. Therapy would have been a much more effective option, and would have pissed off far fewer Muslims.
Viet Nam was a good idea, but violence was applied inaccurately. Yes, that's right, the Viet Nam war was a good idea, and the only reason that most Americans think otherwise is because we lost. Sadly, the US wasn't doing it for the right reasons. We were opposing communist Viet Nam because we feared that the communists would take the enitre region. The correct reason for that war would have been hypocritical unless the US stopped interferring with the Central and South American countries, in which it had been supporting tyrantism since at least the end of World War II. That reason is that no nation, no matter how powerful, should subvert the will of the people of other sovereign nations. The Soviet Union had all but openly declared war on the government of Viet Nam in order to install a more favorable government. The tricky part is that before the war, the French had already done the same thing. Colonialism sucks, but this is not a counter-argument to the thesis to which you were responding.
I think jmorris's question could be better phrased thusly:
"Name a large-scale political or social problem which was solved without the application of violence."
Only a handful come to mind, and most of those are cases where a nation understood in broad terms that what it was doing was wrong, and passive resistance moved public support in favor of not "solving the problem" (e.g. the civil rights movement in the U.S. or colonial Inida). These are poor examples because they represent decisions that were essentially already made. In that sort of case, violence is not required, and its use may be counter-productive (c.f. Iraq).
All that said, the real story in this article is this: Stallman's once again proving that he shouldn't be allowed to talk to reporters. Repeat after me Richard: open source is not a philosophy. That's why you dislike it so much, not because you disagree with the open source philosophy, but because there isn't one to agree with. It's just the distribution of freely modifiable code. Period.
The OP was right. It all looks the same to the immune system.
Good gods no! To the immune system, this would look very different from an infection. For starters, it's going to appear to be "mostly dog", that is, many of the markers that prevent the immue system from attacking will be expressed. Bacteria don't do that, at least not on this scale (though they might mimic the host's markers enough to bypass some of the more common defenses).
No, this is going to look more like a parasite or perhaps some sort of contamination (e.g. blood or other fluids that were exchanged during sex/combat/etc.) from another dog.
The curious part is how this cell defends itself against the immune system. That's a pretty impressive trick, and one that humans haven't been able to match.
Yes and no. I think the more interesting discovery is that there's a species of creature who's anscestry includes a highly evolved creature (dog) and yet is on-par in terms of lifecycle with some of the least complex (colonial microbes). This might cause us to re-think much of what we believe to be true about the evolution of simple species, which might well have gone through this reversion to single-cellular life form multiple times.
Then again, this might be rare enough that it has had little impact on the process. Hard to tell.
Well, to be fair, I'm sure that the OS has little to do with the controls once they're done writing their own code, and I'm sure the same could be done with just about any OS at the "helm".
That depends is Sprint going to control the network? If so, they I will pass up a wireless network at 200Gb/s with dancing girls and a trip into space. I've been burned by Sprint in professional and personal networking over and over again. This time never again means never again.
First off, many torrents are copyrighted, but many more are not, and they're both a problem for ISPs, so yes they'll WANT to. The question is CAN they? I thik they can, but have to look over the details more.
If the system simply facilitiates the protocol blindly, then I don't see how they could be any more to blame for copyright violations than AOL's Web proxies. Sure, gigabytes of copyright violations move through AOL's proxies every day (and get cached to speed up downloads), but they literally don't have the processing power to try to make a distinction. Same goes for the ISPs and BitTorrent (or Gnutella, or any of the other high-bandwidth swarming download technologies).
I doubt that they're adding a wildcard delegation to prevent their people from having a voice. First off, it fails to accomplish that. Second... well, it fails to accomplish that. There's no way at all in which this prevents anyone from using the Internet in that country. The Internet may be a tightly controled resource in that country (I don't know), but it's not because of wildcard delegation.
Something with very little mass which exists even more pervasively than neutrino
No, that's ruled out. The dark matter can't be too light or it messes up things like structure formation.
I thought that was only true if the distribution were uniform? If the distribution of a particle that, say, were more pervasive than neutrinos, but even less interacting were in "clumps", then it could easily have aided structure formation, no?
Of course, that would introduce a whole new set of questions, but so does a massive particle with weak interaction.
most of it needs to be in the form of "weakly interactive massive particles" (sort of analogous to neutrinos, except much heavier
Not quite. That's one scenario, and one that has significant theoretical momentum. However, there's no "need" involved. Some other possibilities include:
Something with very little mass which exists even more pervasively than neutrinos
Something which has mass and yet exibits none of the properties of a particle
>4 dimensional gravitational interaction from normal matter outside of our 4-dimensional universe (string/M theorists are fond of this one)
Non-gravitational space-time curvature
I'm not an astrophysicist, so my memory on the list of available options may be flakey. Feel free to fill in the gaps if I'm forgetting some or mis-described any.
It also shows that no scientific theory can be trusted to be valid past lunch, we just never know when we'll find something new that blows the standing knowledge out of the water.
Hurm... well, yes and no. Theory gives us an excellent start in almost all areas, but theory is only (as a maximum) as valuable as the data on which it is based. We have very little data about the composition of our galaxy (less, even, than we do about the earth, millions of years ago), so it is not shocking that we would find major gaps in our understanding (we only just recently discovered the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (and most or all others).
Can it all really be random?
First off, that's a non-sequitor. Second, "random" isn't the word you want there. When you are talking about large-scale processes, you can use ranomness as a tool to understand, but as we probe the nature of the universe we have consistently found that things that appear to have no order, are in fact very ordered. When you see two planetary objects orbiting one another, that's not random, it's the result of the gravitational forces exerted by those two bodies and, to increasingly lesser degrees, everything else in the universe. If it appears random, that's just becuase you had too little information about the forces involved.
In my experience, the commercial offerings (such as mail frontier) aren't too bad. As far as open source stuff, my personal setup of choice is:
Spamhaus SBL/XBL filtering (hard SMTP-time DNSBLing) based on my expereince with them and their consistent listing of VIOLATORS, not just anyone who shares a netblock with a spammer (i.e. they may not catch as much as some others, but they don't have the FP rate that others do)
Greylisting. This is controversial because many people can't tolerate the delay it introduces. I found a radical decrease in spam when using it (because honeypots have already located a spammer by the time they try again), and only marginal headaches introduced by the delays of new senders. YMMV, and I wouldn't use it in a production environment.
SpamAssassin. I tweek the RBL settings (I *never* want to even score SORBS, for example), and configure razor, but otherwise pretty much leave it in its default configuration, and it works great!
Thunderbird mail filtering. I use evolution and thunderbird. I don't bother turning on mail filtering in evolution, since it uses SpamAssassin, and there's no point using SA twice on the same message. I *do* use thunderbirds filtering as yet-another layer of filtering when I'm using that, and it does a good job of classifying what little spam is left.
And I'm sure they made an impression, all right. These kids will dislike and mistrust the police for the rest of their lives.
Oh please, when will we get over the "poor children" thing? Kids are a lot smarter and more resiliant than we adults typically give them credit for. Would YOU have never been able to trust a cop again if they hauled you in for damaging public property and then let you go? Or would you realize that you were being given a slap on the wrist to make an impression, taken the hint, and not done that again?
The police have a tough job. They have to herd kids in such a way that they don't cause TOO much trouble, but are basically allowed to roam free. It's a balancing act, and I don't see anything in this report to suggest that they overstepped that mandate.
This is no case of evil gubmint stomping on innocent kids. The kids damaged a public tree, and the cops gave them the full treatment to make an impression. There's nothing in particular out of the ordinary here. Cops have been doing the "well, I should book you, but I'll let you go this time" routine for centuries. Cope and move along. There really is nothing to see here.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone really needs to form a label called "half a buck" or "50 cents" that offers artists exactly half of all procedes, without any packaging arm-waving or any other nonsense. Half. Period. It would have to be a popular option.
Again, I don't think you can make that statement in a vacuum, and you have to look at the statistics. If radically more people who are raped commit suicide than people who are not, clearly the experts (those who have been raped) disagree with you.
Still, quality of society as a general concept has nothing to do with the quality of life of the individual. For example, I might be misserable, but as long as that missery is not widespread and I don't impose it on others, that's not a society-impacting event.
On the other hand, if everyone walks around wondering if they'll be raped or killed, that's not a happy place to live. I'm not sure that there's any qualitative difference between the society where everyone thinks they'll be raped vs. the one where they think they'll be murdered.
Now take that and apply it to the concept of punishing crime. Why would you punish one crime more than another if they do equal damage to society (not as an individual act, but as a signpost on the road between Escape from New York and the perfect eutopia)? If so, why? What end does that serve?
That's not really how it works most of the time.
Typically, such work is farmed out in small chunks with specific milestones that are measurable.
That there was one prime on the whole FBI system seems to me to be a fatal flaw, and I have to wonder if this project was ever expected to bear fruit, or if it was just a none-too-subtle attempt to point out what some administrator considered to be a broken process or foolish expectations.
There are places where having greek letters on the keyboard would be vastly useful.
The question you have to ask yourself is: what should the default consumer keyboard have? IMHO, caps lock isn't valuable enough to make the cut. Certainly folks who need one should have the ability to add one (by making whatever OS-specific changes people currently make to map something else to caps-lock, or by using a keyboard-specific technique, like the one I use on my Kinesis keyboard).
Personally, I'd think that control, escape or meta (yes, a real meta, not alt) should go ther, but that's just me.
I'm not sure that that holds water (especially given the radically increased suicide rate among rape victims), but let's say that it's fine. Even then I'm not sure that it matters.
We do not punish someone in order to "balance" a crime. We punish someone in order to maintain a society in which we would wish to live. This is the fundamental reason for the rule of law. All I'm saying is that rape erodes the quality of a society every bit as much as murder, and thus the law should remove that threat in exactly the same way. This cannot be said of, for example, theft.
There are degrees of both rage and lust. When someone taunts me, I'm able to control myself. If someone killed a family member, I'm not sure that I could. When I see someone that I find attractive, I might have trouble introducing myself, but I'm not going to lunge at them either. On the other hand, if I was getting "hot and heavy" with someone who suddenly said "stop", it was an enourmous effort of will to do so. I can easily see myself in a situation as a teenager where I did something that both my partner and I would have regretted, and when it came to sex, I was one of the more enlightened and gentle of my peers... I'm not condoning rape, but at the same time, I can very much understand WHY date rape happens in so many cases. The idea that "no means no" is incomprehensible when your body is screaming "yes".
That said, I have no sympathy for someone who simply thinks that "no" means "yes" and tries to justify their actions as consensual... mostly. That's not what I'm talking about, here, I'm talking about someone doing something in the heat of the moment that, when their head is clearer, they are going to regret.
As with many such topics, I just wish we could have a more open and honest conversation about this as a society, and decide why we're punishing someone. Is it to ease the pain of the victim, or to remove a threat from society? If it's the former, then it's impossible to draw a distinction based on premeditation. If it's the latter, then it's very possible to make such a distinction.
The picture of me on my Web site is meant to be humorous, but I think it does as good a job of establishing my gender as any picutre I'm going to let hit the net
Once again, with people making statements like that, can you imagine the utter shame and horror that a man or boy would suffer, having to admit that a) they didn't want to have sex b) a woman forced them to and c) they feel there should be some sort of action taken as a result. Many men, and I suspect a much greater number of boys, would rather die than admit anything of the sort. It's not manly, and the BEST to come out of it would be if people thought you were queer, and in many circles THAT is as good as being dead.
Besides, you know you can't say anything because everyone's just going to say what you've been saying in this discussion... come on, you know you wanted it.
Side note: you might just want to stop now. You're personifying a rather ugly stereotype.
No, sex doesn't have to involve penetration (shock!) and yes, it's rape if unwanted sexual activity is forced on a person, regardless of what gets probed by what and/or who gets off.
And I hate to break it to you, but there are several ways to give a man, especially a young man, an erection even if he's disgusted by what's being done to him. For reference material, see any good reference on natual studding (that is, animal breeding where artificial insemination is not involved). The erection is NOT a voluntary reflex.
And many victims of rape have commited suicide as a direct result of feeling that death was a preferable state. By your reasoning, torture is less reprehensible than murder, and I cannot agree. Torture is a purely sociopathic act which is made no less heinous for being left alive at the end (in some cases).
Not at all, and I'd certainly disagree with your assessment. I'm guessing that you're fairly young, and if so, I can accept this comment in the way in which it was intended. However, consider that an unwilling target of sexual advances is unwilling regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. The impact to the victim is the concern, and no, male-male rape is not always more traumatic than any particular other combination.
Can you imagine how traumatic it must be to be the victim of such a rape? Not only do you have to live with the memory of it, but if you tell someone, they're going to act as if you should have enjoyed it. It's exactly as bad as telling a woman that she should have enjoyed being raped by a man (or woman for that matter).
No means no, regardless of what type anatomy the person saying it (or ignoring it) happens to possess. I was only discussing premeditation, not further consideration for the imapct of the crime (which is already largely accounted for).
Couple of flaws there: first, a large fraction of rapes (I'm not sure of the count) are not mechanically successful. The complexity argument flies out the window at that point. If such "incomplete" rapes were classified differently, then I would agree with your view, but not as it stands.
Also, I recall that my reactions to arrousal have changed over the years. When I was a teenager, I think I would have disagreed with your notion that one was less reason-imparing than the other. NOW, that's certianly the case, but I'm also more than twice the age I was then.
I should think that would be obvious enough, but if you need an analogy, here's one:
A man walks into a dark room and stumbles over a chair. The chair bumps into something and there is a sound of something shattering.
Scenario 1: The man designates the "something" as "the glass ball", knowing full well that it may be neither glass, nor a ball. This is a way to talk about it with others. A placeholder, nothing more.
Scenario 2: The man asserts that there was a blue, Mexican blown glass ball on a table next to the chair, and that the blue ball was placed there my an older woman who will now want exactly $20.50 to replace it. Further the man asserts that anyone who claims that the ball was red is obviously wrong and their children should not be allowed to play with the children of such deviants.
Do you see the difference between the abitrary labels used as placeholders for observational gaps and religious dogma now? There's also the fact that there's math that suggests that dark matter exists, but that's actually a bit of a side point.
Also: keep in mind that dark matter is like a gap in current theory. If theory is revised in such a way as to narrow that gap to zero, then the need for the placeholder goes away, and everyone's happy.
To be fair, many would argue that rape and murder are on-par because of the long-term trauma that most people suffer as a result of rape. Certainly they are both violent crimes which any sane society takes a very firm stand against, so I'm not sure why jail time should differ between them. The thing that I've always had a problem with is that there are degrees of murder, but not of rape. Granted, it's much harder to commit rape by accident, but in murder cases, there is the concept of premeditation, and the law recognizes a premeditated murder as a distinct sort of crime.
The real problem between those is that we're recognizing the power of rage to erase reason, but not of lust. That seems... uneven.
Iraq is not a problem. See, that's exactly the point, here. Violence *does* solve problems, and often it solves problems that you don't want solved any other way (you could have solved the problem of Hitler's agression by signing over the world to him, for example... no, you wanted violence in that case -- lots of violence).
Iraq, however, is the application of violence to the "problem" of a son's sense of disgrace over his father's (mis)handling of foreign policy. That's not a problem that can actually be solved by the application of violence. Therapy would have been a much more effective option, and would have pissed off far fewer Muslims.
Viet Nam was a good idea, but violence was applied inaccurately. Yes, that's right, the Viet Nam war was a good idea, and the only reason that most Americans think otherwise is because we lost. Sadly, the US wasn't doing it for the right reasons. We were opposing communist Viet Nam because we feared that the communists would take the enitre region. The correct reason for that war would have been hypocritical unless the US stopped interferring with the Central and South American countries, in which it had been supporting tyrantism since at least the end of World War II. That reason is that no nation, no matter how powerful, should subvert the will of the people of other sovereign nations. The Soviet Union had all but openly declared war on the government of Viet Nam in order to install a more favorable government. The tricky part is that before the war, the French had already done the same thing. Colonialism sucks, but this is not a counter-argument to the thesis to which you were responding.
I think jmorris's question could be better phrased thusly:
"Name a large-scale political or social problem which was solved without the application of violence."
Only a handful come to mind, and most of those are cases where a nation understood in broad terms that what it was doing was wrong, and passive resistance moved public support in favor of not "solving the problem" (e.g. the civil rights movement in the U.S. or colonial Inida). These are poor examples because they represent decisions that were essentially already made. In that sort of case, violence is not required, and its use may be counter-productive (c.f. Iraq).
All that said, the real story in this article is this: Stallman's once again proving that he shouldn't be allowed to talk to reporters. Repeat after me Richard: open source is not a philosophy. That's why you dislike it so much, not because you disagree with the open source philosophy, but because there isn't one to agree with. It's just the distribution of freely modifiable code. Period.
Good gods no! To the immune system, this would look very different from an infection. For starters, it's going to appear to be "mostly dog", that is, many of the markers that prevent the immue system from attacking will be expressed. Bacteria don't do that, at least not on this scale (though they might mimic the host's markers enough to bypass some of the more common defenses).
No, this is going to look more like a parasite or perhaps some sort of contamination (e.g. blood or other fluids that were exchanged during sex/combat/etc.) from another dog.
The curious part is how this cell defends itself against the immune system. That's a pretty impressive trick, and one that humans haven't been able to match.
Yes and no. I think the more interesting discovery is that there's a species of creature who's anscestry includes a highly evolved creature (dog) and yet is on-par in terms of lifecycle with some of the least complex (colonial microbes). This might cause us to re-think much of what we believe to be true about the evolution of simple species, which might well have gone through this reversion to single-cellular life form multiple times.
Then again, this might be rare enough that it has had little impact on the process. Hard to tell.
Well, to be fair, I'm sure that the OS has little to do with the controls once they're done writing their own code, and I'm sure the same could be done with just about any OS at the "helm".
That depends is Sprint going to control the network? If so, they I will pass up a wireless network at 200Gb/s with dancing girls and a trip into space. I've been burned by Sprint in professional and personal networking over and over again. This time never again means never again.
First off, many torrents are copyrighted, but many more are not, and they're both a problem for ISPs, so yes they'll WANT to. The question is CAN they? I thik they can, but have to look over the details more.
If the system simply facilitiates the protocol blindly, then I don't see how they could be any more to blame for copyright violations than AOL's Web proxies. Sure, gigabytes of copyright violations move through AOL's proxies every day (and get cached to speed up downloads), but they literally don't have the processing power to try to make a distinction. Same goes for the ISPs and BitTorrent (or Gnutella, or any of the other high-bandwidth swarming download technologies).
I doubt that they're adding a wildcard delegation to prevent their people from having a voice. First off, it fails to accomplish that. Second ... well, it fails to accomplish that. There's no way at all in which this prevents anyone from using the Internet in that country. The Internet may be a tightly controled resource in that country (I don't know), but it's not because of wildcard delegation.
Second, a little nit:
I thought that was only true if the distribution were uniform? If the distribution of a particle that, say, were more pervasive than neutrinos, but even less interacting were in "clumps", then it could easily have aided structure formation, no?
Of course, that would introduce a whole new set of questions, but so does a massive particle with weak interaction.
In other words palimpsest
Not quite. That's one scenario, and one that has significant theoretical momentum. However, there's no "need" involved. Some other possibilities include:
I'm not an astrophysicist, so my memory on the list of available options may be flakey. Feel free to fill in the gaps if I'm forgetting some or mis-described any.
Hurm... well, yes and no. Theory gives us an excellent start in almost all areas, but theory is only (as a maximum) as valuable as the data on which it is based. We have very little data about the composition of our galaxy (less, even, than we do about the earth, millions of years ago), so it is not shocking that we would find major gaps in our understanding (we only just recently discovered the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (and most or all others).
First off, that's a non-sequitor. Second, "random" isn't the word you want there. When you are talking about large-scale processes, you can use ranomness as a tool to understand, but as we probe the nature of the universe we have consistently found that things that appear to have no order, are in fact very ordered. When you see two planetary objects orbiting one another, that's not random, it's the result of the gravitational forces exerted by those two bodies and, to increasingly lesser degrees, everything else in the universe. If it appears random, that's just becuase you had too little information about the forces involved.
YMMV. Good luck.
Oh please, when will we get over the "poor children" thing? Kids are a lot smarter and more resiliant than we adults typically give them credit for. Would YOU have never been able to trust a cop again if they hauled you in for damaging public property and then let you go? Or would you realize that you were being given a slap on the wrist to make an impression, taken the hint, and not done that again?
The police have a tough job. They have to herd kids in such a way that they don't cause TOO much trouble, but are basically allowed to roam free. It's a balancing act, and I don't see anything in this report to suggest that they overstepped that mandate.
This is no case of evil gubmint stomping on innocent kids. The kids damaged a public tree, and the cops gave them the full treatment to make an impression. There's nothing in particular out of the ordinary here. Cops have been doing the "well, I should book you, but I'll let you go this time" routine for centuries. Cope and move along. There really is nothing to see here.