Especially in states like Australia, where you vote by ranking a list of maybe 50 candidates, it's ridiculous to expect citizens to study the individual preferences of every single candidate. Candidates join parties (of which Australia has pretty much as many as they care to) in order to signal where they stand on the issues. The parties also implicitly say which issues are "conscience issues" to them, in which case it's the voter's responsibility to research the individual candidates' position.
Compared to the US/UK, in Australia, politicians can choose their parties very freely. So the opportunity for party leadership to push policies on unwilling representatives is pretty limited.
Those were all real computers. The real gulf was between computers (which were really only used to play games) and early consoles (which could only be used to play games). Few people had both when I was a kid, and there was a bitter culture war:)
I don't know. I'm a fan of Ubuntu, but I find that after three or four dist-upgrades, enough things don't work that it's worth doing a reinstall (keeping all the important customizations and custom installed programs, naturally -/home,/etc and/usr/local).
Such as right now. One of my customizations was alt+left/right to switch workspaces, combined with a devilspie script to start common applications on particular workspaces. The idea was that since you switch between tabs/open files with alt+up/down in many of those apps, I could quickly move between and into applications where I wanted, faster and with less thinking/watching than alt+tabbing or similar.
It worked reasonably well, but when I upgraded, it broke badly. It would frequently trigger a bug where all UI elements except menus become unresponsive - text fields, buttons, everything. The bug would also prevent all forms of workspace switching. The only way to get it responsive again would be to open up a menu and close it. If the bug triggered on a workspace with no windows, killing the X server was the only practical fix.
I had to switch workspace switching to super+left/right (sacrificing elegant in-application switching) and still the bug triggers occasionally. I've tried to report it, but I don't expect it to be fixed - my setup is too unusual for maintainers to care, even though it triggers something that really shouldn't be possible (killing all non-menu responsiveness in Gnome). Next version I expect I'll do a reinstall, reactivate my customizations and hope for the best.
There's a very good one, actually. It's possible to install a program to enable you to read books written for another language region, but it takes several years and a lot of hard work.
A catholic funeral is not a celebration of the life of the deceased, no. It's up to them to decide, and they generally won't bury you unless you ask for it before you're dead.
I think it's perfectly OK. What if the person didn't do anything all that notable in his life? In death we are all the same anyway. The funeral seems a good place to recall that.
Deciding what a state should do is not a skill in the manner of medicine and plumbing. Why don't you move to China, if you think so? There are plenty of really smart people in China, and their institutions are actually more than good enough to get highly qualified administrators.
It's just that they are higly efficient at doing things which are in their own interests, as individuals or groups, rather than in the interests of the people they are ruling over. Even the communist party admits that they have a huge problem with corruption, and they see only the "as individuals" part.
Even if you had "perfect" voters and "perfect" politicians representing the majority we'd still have situations like two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Couldn't you antidemocrats at least come up with some new analogies from time to time? If you have two wolves and a sheep is what you've got, no arrangement is going to prevent dead animals. Schemes to "protect minorities" through novel non-democratic arrangements usually end up with the single wolf protected from the "tyranny" of the two sheep forcing him to starvation.
There is no way to give minorities extra power only when they deserve it.
Well, f*** the fascist founding fathers. They're not even my state's founders, why should I care what they thought?
People are entitled to take part in government, because they have a legitimate interest in how it's run. It concerns them. Their qualifications, "character" or lack of it does not matter, and to the degree that your FFs disagreed, they were simply illiberal bastardss.
I didn't say anything about what's in anyone's best interest, I merely ventured a moral opinion.
But before you misinterpret me further: I am not really calling for any kind of test or legislation. It was mererly a snarky way of saying that people who think they are entitled to disregard other people's interests are assholes.
First of all, these two aren't contradictory if you look closely. The wordnetweb definition is also rather poor as a description of the way the word is commonly used - wiktionary's is better.
But this is straying into essentialism. It shouldn't really matter what labels we use for things. I was only arguing that according to xtifr's definiton of religion (which included buddhism, scientology and communism), there would be few or no atheists who didn't have some sort of it.
No, at least for a long while, soviet communists saw their beliefs as mere scientific fact. In other words, any reasonable, intelligent man unclouded by superstition would come to the same conclusion both regarding religion and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
I have met a Chinese diplomat who just shrugged and said "communism" when asked what his religion was, but a) Chinese communism is pretty far removed from Lenin and Marx and b) not all atheists care whether you classify their beliefs as a form of religion or not.
You cannot legislate belief. You can persecute people, the way most religions have done to eachother for thousands of years, and you can get those whom you're persecuting to say that they now believe what you believe, but you can't actually make someone believe something by threatening or harming them.
The religious persecution in the Soviet Union was not all that different from what, say Dawkins wants: he has argued that passing on a religion (besides an atheistic one, presumably) to your children is abuse and should be forcibly prevented.
Atheism isn't a religion, in the same sense theism isn't a religion. But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion, I think it's not possible to find anyone who is "only" an atheist. Atheists have stamps of their own to collect.
That communists aren't "only" atheists are obvious to all - except communists themselves, a rather important exception. Other groups of atheists are typically self-oblivious in the same manner.
The Soviets did not collect those "stamps" either. If you would still say they had a "hobby", I would say what forum atheists do consitutes a "hobby" as well.
I'd like a morality test for voters instead. Anyone who thinks that he knows what is in another man's best interest because that other man lacks some skill or talent, and therefore would deny him suffrage, hasn't understood what democracy is about and should be publicly shamed for his depravity and asked to stay home at election day.
People don't get that power doesn't go away. When legislators are prevented from passing laws by deadlocks, unelected judges make laws through semi-theological interpretation of existing ones. When states don't have formal institutions to hold each other to deals and keep from each other's throats, the strong states dictate and act as regional or global "police". When civil authorities break down, warlords step in.
True, true, it's very disturbing. But, if our politicians are clever enough capitalize on ignorance about H.C Andersen's authorship, we're pretty much screwed anyway.
Wondered if anyone should bring up that xkcd. Yes, heliocentrism is just really a convention that makes the maths easier, so it's a bit weird that it's come up as test of backwardness ("they think the sun moves around the earth!"). After all, there are much less ambiguous facts that people get wrong for conservative reasons.
"Atheism" is about the belief in god(s), which is not necessarily a required component of a religion. If Buddhism (which is neutral on the topic of gods) and Scientology (which believes in alien clams that build DC-10s inside volcanoes, or something) qualify as religions, I don't see why Soviet "Communism" doesn't.
Fair enough, but then I don't see why atheism (as practiced in OT discussions on countless bulletin boards, if you prefer) shouldn't qualify as a "religion" as well.
Google Checkout is limited to only merchants in the U.S. and U.K.
Just like the Nexus One was, just like the Android market is. Google predictably and repeatably fails at being an international organization. I'm an unashamed Google fan, but this drives me nuts at times.
The best bit: ARM chips are everywhere, and they are presumably very friendly to implementing Acorn Archimedes emulators. Archimedes on your fridge, yeah!
The TrustZone memory model appears to be a MMU extension of sorts. It's used for supporting all sorts of operating system security at the hardware level, not just DRM. If your OS doesn't care about DRM, the processor won't, either...
No, look again. Definitions 2 and 3 refer back to 1 ("the plan agreed upon", "such a plan"). You can't reasonably claim to have meant 4 when you're talked about a conspiracy against someone.
I question YOUR motives, since you apparently aren't able to read such a simple definition if it would mean that you were embarrassed. But yes, I'm motivated to criticize bullshit spouted by AGW denialists. I have children, I'd like them to be alive and well in a non-mad max world in fifty years.
Does it actually matter why? There was an organized conspiracy against a scientific journal that was intended to manipulate its editorial board, with financial harm used as the weapon.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
Conspiracies by definition are secret. This was a broad and highly public boycott campaign of a journal that had published a paper that should never have passed peer review (according to most of the people who did peer review for that journal!).
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Especially in states like Australia, where you vote by ranking a list of maybe 50 candidates, it's ridiculous to expect citizens to study the individual preferences of every single candidate. Candidates join parties (of which Australia has pretty much as many as they care to) in order to signal where they stand on the issues. The parties also implicitly say which issues are "conscience issues" to them, in which case it's the voter's responsibility to research the individual candidates' position.
Compared to the US/UK, in Australia, politicians can choose their parties very freely. So the opportunity for party leadership to push policies on unwilling representatives is pretty limited.
Those were all real computers. The real gulf was between computers (which were really only used to play games) and early consoles (which could only be used to play games). Few people had both when I was a kid, and there was a bitter culture war :)
And it was Commodore 64 (real computer) vs Nintendo Entertainment System (walled garden toy).
What fixed that for you? I think you're missing an "I".
I don't know. I'm a fan of Ubuntu, but I find that after three or four dist-upgrades, enough things don't work that it's worth doing a reinstall (keeping all the important customizations and custom installed programs, naturally - /home, /etc and /usr/local).
Such as right now. One of my customizations was alt+left/right to switch workspaces, combined with a devilspie script to start common applications on particular workspaces. The idea was that since you switch between tabs/open files with alt+up/down in many of those apps, I could quickly move between and into applications where I wanted, faster and with less thinking/watching than alt+tabbing or similar.
It worked reasonably well, but when I upgraded, it broke badly. It would frequently trigger a bug where all UI elements except menus become unresponsive - text fields, buttons, everything. The bug would also prevent all forms of workspace switching. The only way to get it responsive again would be to open up a menu and close it. If the bug triggered on a workspace with no windows, killing the X server was the only practical fix.
I had to switch workspace switching to super+left/right (sacrificing elegant in-application switching) and still the bug triggers occasionally. I've tried to report it, but I don't expect it to be fixed - my setup is too unusual for maintainers to care, even though it triggers something that really shouldn't be possible (killing all non-menu responsiveness in Gnome). Next version I expect I'll do a reinstall, reactivate my customizations and hope for the best.
There's a very good one, actually. It's possible to install a program to enable you to read books written for another language region, but it takes several years and a lot of hard work.
Some people are working on automatic cracking tools, but they're not very good.
Especially when George Lucas sues you for making lightsaber noises.
A catholic funeral is not a celebration of the life of the deceased, no. It's up to them to decide, and they generally won't bury you unless you ask for it before you're dead.
I think it's perfectly OK. What if the person didn't do anything all that notable in his life? In death we are all the same anyway. The funeral seems a good place to recall that.
Deciding what a state should do is not a skill in the manner of medicine and plumbing. Why don't you move to China, if you think so? There are plenty of really smart people in China, and their institutions are actually more than good enough to get highly qualified administrators.
It's just that they are higly efficient at doing things which are in their own interests, as individuals or groups, rather than in the interests of the people they are ruling over. Even the communist party admits that they have a huge problem with corruption, and they see only the "as individuals" part.
Couldn't you antidemocrats at least come up with some new analogies from time to time? If you have two wolves and a sheep is what you've got, no arrangement is going to prevent dead animals. Schemes to "protect minorities" through novel non-democratic arrangements usually end up with the single wolf protected from the "tyranny" of the two sheep forcing him to starvation.
There is no way to give minorities extra power only when they deserve it.
Well, f*** the fascist founding fathers. They're not even my state's founders, why should I care what they thought?
People are entitled to take part in government, because they have a legitimate interest in how it's run. It concerns them. Their qualifications, "character" or lack of it does not matter, and to the degree that your FFs disagreed, they were simply illiberal bastardss.
I didn't say anything about what's in anyone's best interest, I merely ventured a moral opinion.
But before you misinterpret me further: I am not really calling for any kind of test or legislation. It was mererly a snarky way of saying that people who think they are entitled to disregard other people's interests are assholes.
First of all, these two aren't contradictory if you look closely. The wordnetweb definition is also rather poor as a description of the way the word is commonly used - wiktionary's is better.
But this is straying into essentialism. It shouldn't really matter what labels we use for things. I was only arguing that according to xtifr's definiton of religion (which included buddhism, scientology and communism), there would be few or no atheists who didn't have some sort of it.
No, at least for a long while, soviet communists saw their beliefs as mere scientific fact. In other words, any reasonable, intelligent man unclouded by superstition would come to the same conclusion both regarding religion and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
I have met a Chinese diplomat who just shrugged and said "communism" when asked what his religion was, but a) Chinese communism is pretty far removed from Lenin and Marx and b) not all atheists care whether you classify their beliefs as a form of religion or not.
The religious persecution in the Soviet Union was not all that different from what, say Dawkins wants: he has argued that passing on a religion (besides an atheistic one, presumably) to your children is abuse and should be forcibly prevented.
Bascially, yes.
Atheism isn't a religion, in the same sense theism isn't a religion. But just as it's obviously impossible to find a theist who does not in fact have a religion, I think it's not possible to find anyone who is "only" an atheist. Atheists have stamps of their own to collect.
That communists aren't "only" atheists are obvious to all - except communists themselves, a rather important exception. Other groups of atheists are typically self-oblivious in the same manner.
The Soviets did not collect those "stamps" either. If you would still say they had a "hobby", I would say what forum atheists do consitutes a "hobby" as well.
I'd like a morality test for voters instead. Anyone who thinks that he knows what is in another man's best interest because that other man lacks some skill or talent, and therefore would deny him suffrage, hasn't understood what democracy is about and should be publicly shamed for his depravity and asked to stay home at election day.
I suspect it's missing a stupidity tag.
People don't get that power doesn't go away. When legislators are prevented from passing laws by deadlocks, unelected judges make laws through semi-theological interpretation of existing ones. When states don't have formal institutions to hold each other to deals and keep from each other's throats, the strong states dictate and act as regional or global "police". When civil authorities break down, warlords step in.
True, true, it's very disturbing. But, if our politicians are clever enough capitalize on ignorance about H.C Andersen's authorship, we're pretty much screwed anyway.
Wondered if anyone should bring up that xkcd. Yes, heliocentrism is just really a convention that makes the maths easier, so it's a bit weird that it's come up as test of backwardness ("they think the sun moves around the earth!"). After all, there are much less ambiguous facts that people get wrong for conservative reasons.
Fair enough, but then I don't see why atheism (as practiced in OT discussions on countless bulletin boards, if you prefer) shouldn't qualify as a "religion" as well.
Just like the Nexus One was, just like the Android market is. Google predictably and repeatably fails at being an international organization. I'm an unashamed Google fan, but this drives me nuts at times.
The best bit: ARM chips are everywhere, and they are presumably very friendly to implementing Acorn Archimedes emulators. Archimedes on your fridge, yeah!
The TrustZone memory model appears to be a MMU extension of sorts. It's used for supporting all sorts of operating system security at the hardware level, not just DRM. If your OS doesn't care about DRM, the processor won't, either...
No, look again. Definitions 2 and 3 refer back to 1 ("the plan agreed upon", "such a plan"). You can't reasonably claim to have meant 4 when you're talked about a conspiracy against someone.
I question YOUR motives, since you apparently aren't able to read such a simple definition if it would mean that you were embarrassed. But yes, I'm motivated to criticize bullshit spouted by AGW denialists. I have children, I'd like them to be alive and well in a non-mad max world in fifty years.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
Conspiracies by definition are secret. This was a broad and highly public boycott campaign of a journal that had published a paper that should never have passed peer review (according to most of the people who did peer review for that journal!).