I think Robot Wars a bit unambitious. I'd like to see a special series commissioned with 3 metre tall robots. Obviously beyond the resources of small groups, they'd be built by multinational corporations. Who wouldn't want to see Sun's, Microsoft's and IBM's behemoths in a ring together?
...it was a strawman. The original poster clearly said "devices that could wipe out all life on earth." Then he knocked that strawman down.
That's not a strawman. To create a strawman you have to misinterpret the argument of your opponents. He never claimed that the (even more) original poster supported the right to use weapons of mass destruction. He merely claimed that "arms" represented "devices that could wipe out all life on earth". You might disagree (you'd be wrong; look up the word), but that in no way makes it a strawman.
Mining my garden is a bit of a different story. First, you don't "bear" mines; you plant them.
The poster I was replying to stated that the reasons he supported the carrying of firearms was NOT because of the constitution, so this is irrelevent. Feel free to read the post you skipped over.
Second, planting them in my garden would make me responsible for any harm that came to someone who accidentally wandered through.
You're also responsible for any damage you do with a firearm; what's your point? My point was that if the original poster really believed that you should be able to defend yourself with any weapon targetted against the individual, s/he should logically defend your right to mine your garden, a position most people would consider extreme.
Third, mines are not primarily used for self-defense, but rather for denying access to a piece of land.
Irrelevent. They can be used effectively for self-defense. But this is really the heart of the debate: what's so special about guns? They're just one point in a spectrum of defensive weapons.
Ah, but moral grounds is exactly where this argument belongs, as do all arguments that involve using the force of law to bend folks to your will! If a law is not moral, then it should not be a law, no matter how much we want the results that the law might achieve. The ends do not justify the means.
Yes, you are correct, but that was not arguing against what I was trying to say. I think almost everyone agrees that there is a limit on what measures you can take to defend yourself. Where the line should be drawn is where the argument is, not the question of whether you should be able to. In the US, the line is drawn (in general) between handguns and assault-rifles, whereas most other first-world countries (who happen to have lower homicide rates) draw the line before firearms.
I don't think there's anything morally wrong with owning a gun (if it was legal in my country I'd get one) but the social advantages of keeping firearms out of the hands of the general populace seem obvious to me, and I vote to remove access to them for myself and everyone else.
It was a valid point. You aren't allowed to carry AK47's or grenades are you? (at least I assume you aren't). And they are the weapons of choice for most of the world's infantry. I assume you're not allowed to mine your garden with anti-personnel devices either (although I take it that you think you should be following from your arguments).
The argument is not of course a conclusive case for tighter gun control. But I think it does move the focus of teh argument to practical grounds from moral ones.
However, there is a balance: there are many things the US police are not allowed to do, or are supposed to go to a great deal more trouble to do, compared to Canada or the UK
Come on, examples please. You know you can't go around making statements like that on/. without backing it up:)
Actually feinting at the sight of blood might actually be a good tactic for a policeman. Unfortunately none of the coppers I've met would have the intelligence to try it - they'd be more likely to faint.
You must be getting different spam from what I'm getting, or you haven't looked at your inbox lately. The subject lines have things like: "Congratulations!", "Long time no see", "Here's the info you requested". You can usually have a stab at predicting which ones are spam, but its not generally worth risking missing a genuine email.
I remember hearing that story in school as well, and the formula seemed obvious to me before I saw what it was - there's fifty pairs of numbers that add up to 100 (0+100, 1+99,... 51+49) plus 50. Or 50*100 + 50 = 5050. I doubt Gauss was the first to discover that formula, as it was so simple - either that, or I'm a maths genius. It's a nice idea, but I don't think so.
A different useful modification to mobiles I can think of is to have an additional answer button that stops the phone vibrating/ringing while the callee moves to a non-obtrusive area. The caller would hear a recorded message saying "The receiver has registered your call and will connect shortly". Then move outside and press 'OK'.
Means you don't have to make a decision between cutting off a potentially important call and being obnoxious by sqwuaking "I can't talk now! I'm in the library! Hang on while I move outside, shouting to you all the way!"
This would be easily implemented and wouldn't necessarily need compliance with the calling phone.
I remember a couple of years ago, I remember reading in Viz magazine (British adult humour comic) a letter, which said something along the lines of: "These computers are disgusting! I bought one last week and within minutes of turning on I was able to draw a picture of a Boy Scout buggering a guide dog!" The letter was complete with a badly-drawn stick-image, presumably done in m$ paint (which kind of begs the question, how realistic does the drawing have to be to qualify as porn?) The letter was presented as a joke, but with this possible law, presumably it would be illegal.
One thing I've always kind of wondered about in the laws of child porn, is whether a situation like this would be legal: say I, at the age of 8 took a picture of myself naked, having a wank or something (I didn't BTW), could I be prosecuted for owning it? It seems a bit weird if you could be arrested for owning a picture of yourself. How about if you created a virtual picture of your younger self naked? That really seems bizarre. Don't you have the right to own your own image?
My instinct in this issue is to side with the free speech advocates, but do we really want to see virtual childporn on sale in the high street? I know it wouldn't be quite like that, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with it being a legal fetish. A tricky one.
How the hell did this get marked Insightful? What happened to political tolerance?
There's two major points wrong with this comment, apart from the rhetoric:
1) The UK Labour party is socialist? When did that happen? They haven't been a socialist party for 20 years. Even they don't claim they're socialist.
2) Socialists don't have respect for individual rights? What about: abolition of slavery, votes for women, votes for non-landowners, vote by secret ballot, abortion rights,national health service, state pension, minimum wage, gay rights etc. All of the above were (or are) opposed in the UK by the Conservatives and supported by the socialists.
IIRC the nearest star is about 10 light-years away
Actually, it's a bit closer than that - about eight light minutes. But perhaps you're thinking of Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.6 light years distant.
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Re:Bombs might be more likely, but not nuclear war
on
'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 1
Can you provide any serious research that proves that homosexuallity is genetic? Thats a pretty interesting claim...
If it was, wouldn't the trait have died out long ago? I mean its naturally deselecting...
The genes for homosexuality are thought to be passed maternally (if you are homosexual, then your most likely candidate for a gay relation would be your uncle on your mother's side), and are advantageous for genes on the y-chromosome.
If you want a reference, try 'Genome', a popular science book by (I think) Simon Harris where it's covered quite well. I think the latest research suggests that homosexuality is about 60% inherited.
If you have several highly-paid developers who work faster with a particular language (and Java is one of the fastest languages to develop for) it might well be cheaper to spend cash upgrading hardware than paying your developers for another few weeks work.
yeah, but if, say, a Moldovan website has some info about an innovative cancer cure, how do you know whether those doctors are reliable? And what stops you faking this information? ---
Be a bloody good thing if homeopathy gets banished from the web because it's a pile of crap, but it's not going to happen. This is just a proposal for a way to allow you to have some confidence (or otherwise) in the standard of medical advice sites are giving you. I support it.
Alternative medicine is a weird name anyway. Isn't acupuncture now used by lots of doctors anyway? When does something stop being called 'alternative'?
. He would have a better chance of being say a computer programmer than a religious leader
Yeah. Luckily, it's already been done. You see, Richard Stallman is the new messiah. This may seem like a strange time to break the truth, but it's got to come out some time I suppose. The proof? Just look at the similarity in beard tastes...
Likening GPL to communism and BSD to socialism is quite flawed. Communism and socialism are both about physical property. Neither a copyright, nor a patent are physical property. Both are mere societal conventions we follow in the hopes of achieving certain ends.
Private property is just as much a social convention as intellectual property, unless you count the land or goods you can physically grab and protect with your fists and teeth. Your house may be different because you live there, but things like eg the cash in your bank account or the shares in the Linux startup you "own" or a bit of land the other side of the country left to you in her will be aunt Muriel are only yours because the government says they are. ---
Slashdot Mirror
I think Robot Wars a bit unambitious. I'd like to see a special series commissioned with 3 metre tall robots. Obviously beyond the resources of small groups, they'd be built by multinational corporations. Who wouldn't want to see Sun's, Microsoft's and IBM's behemoths in a ring together?
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...it was a strawman. The original poster clearly said "devices that could wipe out all life on earth." Then he knocked that strawman down.
That's not a strawman. To create a strawman you have to misinterpret the argument of your opponents. He never claimed that the (even more) original poster supported the right to use weapons of mass destruction. He merely claimed that "arms" represented "devices that could wipe out all life on earth". You might disagree (you'd be wrong; look up the word), but that in no way makes it a strawman.
Mining my garden is a bit of a different story. First, you don't "bear" mines; you plant them.
The poster I was replying to stated that the reasons he supported the carrying of firearms was NOT because of the constitution, so this is irrelevent. Feel free to read the post you skipped over.
Second, planting them in my garden would make me responsible for any harm that came to someone who accidentally wandered through.
You're also responsible for any damage you do with a firearm; what's your point? My point was that if the original poster really believed that you should be able to defend yourself with any weapon targetted against the individual, s/he should logically defend your right to mine your garden, a position most people would consider extreme.
Third, mines are not primarily used for self-defense, but rather for denying access to a piece of land.
Irrelevent. They can be used effectively for self-defense. But this is really the heart of the debate: what's so special about guns? They're just one point in a spectrum of defensive weapons.
Ah, but moral grounds is exactly where this argument belongs, as do all arguments that involve using the force of law to bend folks to your will! If a law is not moral, then it should not be a law, no matter how much we want the results that the law might achieve. The ends do not justify the means.
Yes, you are correct, but that was not arguing against what I was trying to say. I think almost everyone agrees that there is a limit on what measures you can take to defend yourself. Where the line should be drawn is where the argument is, not the question of whether you should be able to. In the US, the line is drawn (in general) between handguns and assault-rifles, whereas most other first-world countries (who happen to have lower homicide rates) draw the line before firearms.
I don't think there's anything morally wrong with owning a gun (if it was legal in my country I'd get one) but the social advantages of keeping firearms out of the hands of the general populace seem obvious to me, and I vote to remove access to them for myself and everyone else.
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It was a valid point. You aren't allowed to carry AK47's or grenades are you? (at least I assume you aren't). And they are the weapons of choice for most of the world's infantry. I assume you're not allowed to mine your garden with anti-personnel devices either (although I take it that you think you should be following from your arguments).
The argument is not of course a conclusive case for tighter gun control. But I think it does move the focus of teh argument to practical grounds from moral ones.
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However, there is a balance: there are many things the US police are not allowed to do, or are supposed to go to a great deal more trouble to do, compared to Canada or the UK
/. without backing it up :)
Come on, examples please. You know you can't go around making statements like that on
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Actually feinting at the sight of blood might actually be a good tactic for a policeman. Unfortunately none of the coppers I've met would have the intelligence to try it - they'd be more likely to faint.
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You must be getting different spam from what I'm getting, or you haven't looked at your inbox lately. The subject lines have things like: "Congratulations!", "Long time no see", "Here's the info you requested". You can usually have a stab at predicting which ones are spam, but its not generally worth risking missing a genuine email.
---
I remember hearing that story in school as well, and the formula seemed obvious to me before I saw what it was - there's fifty pairs of numbers that add up to 100 (0+100, 1+99, ... 51+49) plus 50. Or 50*100 + 50 = 5050. I doubt Gauss was the first to discover that formula, as it was so simple - either that, or I'm a maths genius. It's a nice idea, but I don't think so.
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A different useful modification to mobiles I can think of is to have an additional answer button that stops the phone vibrating/ringing while the callee moves to a non-obtrusive area. The caller would hear a recorded message saying "The receiver has registered your call and will connect shortly". Then move outside and press 'OK'.
Means you don't have to make a decision between cutting off a potentially important call and being obnoxious by sqwuaking "I can't talk now! I'm in the library! Hang on while I move outside, shouting to you all the way!"
This would be easily implemented and wouldn't necessarily need compliance with the calling phone.
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And the good guys are...?
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I remember a couple of years ago, I remember reading in Viz magazine (British adult humour comic) a letter, which said something along the lines of: "These computers are disgusting! I bought one last week and within minutes of turning on I was able to draw a picture of a Boy Scout buggering a guide dog!" The letter was complete with a badly-drawn stick-image, presumably done in m$ paint (which kind of begs the question, how realistic does the drawing have to be to qualify as porn?) The letter was presented as a joke, but with this possible law, presumably it would be illegal.
One thing I've always kind of wondered about in the laws of child porn, is whether a situation like this would be legal: say I, at the age of 8 took a picture of myself naked, having a wank or something (I didn't BTW), could I be prosecuted for owning it? It seems a bit weird if you could be arrested for owning a picture of yourself. How about if you created a virtual picture of your younger self naked? That really seems bizarre. Don't you have the right to own your own image?
My instinct in this issue is to side with the free speech advocates, but do we really want to see virtual childporn on sale in the high street? I know it wouldn't be quite like that, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with it being a legal fetish. A tricky one.
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http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q4/avery.html (the parent link seemed to get a bit mangled). I knew there was something weird about that JunkScience site.
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How the hell did this get marked Insightful? What happened to political tolerance?
There's two major points wrong with this comment, apart from the rhetoric:
1) The UK Labour party is socialist? When did that happen? They haven't been a socialist party for 20 years. Even they don't claim they're socialist.
2) Socialists don't have respect for individual rights? What about: abolition of slavery, votes for women, votes for non-landowners, vote by secret ballot, abortion rights,national health service, state pension, minimum wage, gay rights etc. All of the above were (or are) opposed in the UK by the Conservatives and supported by the socialists.
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IIRC the nearest star is about 10 light-years away
Actually, it's a bit closer than that - about eight light minutes. But perhaps you're thinking of Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.6 light years distant.
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Oh, that's alright then.
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Can you provide any serious research that proves that homosexuallity is genetic? Thats a pretty interesting claim...
If it was, wouldn't the trait have died out long ago? I mean its naturally deselecting...
The genes for homosexuality are thought to be passed maternally (if you are homosexual, then your most likely candidate for a gay relation would be your uncle on your mother's side), and are advantageous for genes on the y-chromosome.
If you want a reference, try 'Genome', a popular science book by (I think) Simon Harris where it's covered quite well. I think the latest research suggests that homosexuality is about 60% inherited.
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The very existence of System.out.println demonstrates that java isn't purely OO
Sorry, can't see that. How is that not object oriented? How would it be implemented in a 'true' OO language?
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If you have several highly-paid developers who work faster with a particular language (and Java is one of the fastest languages to develop for) it might well be cheaper to spend cash upgrading hardware than paying your developers for another few weeks work.
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I submitted this story. It's meant to say the first BOOK published in the West. I cocked up. Sorry. *holds hands up*.
To be honest I don't think it's that interesting just having a major bible online. The British Library has done it well though.
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I posted the story, and I meant to say BOOK. D'oh! I felt sure it wouldn't get posted simply as the first bible.
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yeah, but if, say, a Moldovan website has some info about an innovative cancer cure, how do you know whether those doctors are reliable? And what stops you faking this information?
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Be a bloody good thing if homeopathy gets banished from the web because it's a pile of crap, but it's not going to happen. This is just a proposal for a way to allow you to have some confidence (or otherwise) in the standard of medical advice sites are giving you. I support it.
Alternative medicine is a weird name anyway. Isn't acupuncture now used by lots of doctors anyway? When does something stop being called 'alternative'?
BTW, what's ROlfing?
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Er, no. A neutron star has a diameter of about 10 kilometers.
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. He would have a better chance of being say a computer programmer than a religious leader
Yeah. Luckily, it's already been done. You see, Richard Stallman is the new messiah. This may seem like a strange time to break the truth, but it's got to come out some time I suppose. The proof? Just look at the similarity in beard tastes...
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Why?
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Likening GPL to communism and BSD to socialism is quite flawed. Communism and socialism are both about physical property. Neither a copyright, nor a patent are physical property. Both are mere societal conventions we follow in the hopes of achieving certain ends.
Private property is just as much a social convention as intellectual property, unless you count the land or goods you can physically grab and protect with your fists and teeth. Your house may be different because you live there, but things like eg the cash in your bank account or the shares in the Linux startup you "own" or a bit of land the other side of the country left to you in her will be aunt Muriel are only yours because the government says they are.
---