"Really? Offensive to whom? Who decides what is 'hate-speech'?"
The people that feel offended enough to make a case out of it, on which a court of law decides. It's simple.
"You should have a right to hate someone, and have the right to proclaim your hatred."
Sure, but there's a difference between unintentionally causing offense and willingly doing so by targeting an individual. That last is distastefull and should be punishable IMHO.
It's like the difference between stating that you hate people who commit suicide or trolling like said person in the UK did.
You might not have noticed, but most of Europe does _not_ speak English. In dutch it's known as Informatica, in French as informatique, in Spanish as Informatica and in german as Informatik.
I'll leave it up to you and your arse to google translate the word into the rest of Europe's 20+ languages.
Yeah, because putting pressure on Neelie Smit-Kroes proved sooo usefull in the Microsoft anti-trust case e.g.
Due to internal politics in the EU she's no longer Competition Commissioner, but believe me, pressurizing her does not work well.
She has really done a wealth of good for competition and the free market in Europe and has dealt with the largest and meanest corporations and governments without budging one inch.
Yeah or maybe vegans are the only ones to have sane bacteria and there is some germ pulling meat-eaters ropes to make them feed up on the ol' red meat.
The findings "open up very exciting speculation" about using probiotics to treat mood disorders in people, says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, Los Angeles."
Me too. I'm surprised this is news to a gastroenterologist. I though it was well known that other, non-biotic, inhabitants influence the mind too. Very nasty if you have candadiasis, which is an out of control growth of this critter.
"A few days ago, a couple from Europe died of heat stroke in Death Valley. The local temperature was 105 degrees fahrenheit, which was low for that place in this time of year. In places I've lived, 105 degrees is a nice day. But since two people died, does that mean the weather was catastrophic? Well, if you look at the translated pages from their home town, yeah, they were getting all hysterical because these people were out in 41c weather. I guess where you happen to live, that can seem like a lot."
The couple was from Tilburg, Netherlands and as the manager of a well-known culture podium his death got a lot of coverage. Although we have no deserts here obviously 41 degrees celsius is not so extreme and the hysterical coverage you speak of, well, I haven't noticed it.
Looks to me the guy and his girlfriend didn't take the correct precautions (driving a normal car on a 4x4 track, not having enough water) and paid the price.
Of course, you living in California must mean you'll be roughing it all the time and wouldn't make stupid mistakes like underestimating the severity of say... an earthquake. Would you?
I thought Apple prided itself on making better products, but by bringing these cases before a judge they admit they are not competing on quality anymore.
Weird. I've had almost the same experience switching from Enlightenment to WindowMaker to KDE to GNOME to Unity. Not wanting to tweak every and all settings anymore. Growing out of the compile-my-own-kernel mode.
But your solution... OSX? I wouldn't think of using OSX as the times I've had to navigate it on friends computers it seemed totally counter-inituitive to me...
I actually like Unity. It seems I'm one of the few. It's clean, simple, fast, doesn't get in my way... actually to me it feels like going back to WindowMaker, but this time with a filemanager and without having to configure settings manually.
I'm actually incredibly happy about Unity ditching all menu's... I really don't like menu's in OS (in applications is another story), never can find anything, always have to look twice even if I know where the item is.
I agree. I think there are sideeffects with the zero tolerance punishment based punitive systems that might be responsible for higher crime rates in the U.S.
If you punish minor crimes like shoplifting or using drugs with prison sentences, you are effectively training better criminals. In prison there are plenty of people to learn them the fine tricks of e.g. auto theft or such and their doing prison time does not make them good candidates on the regular job market.
Also, if you can get punished with years of prison sentence for something trivial like pot-smoking, this effectively lowers the bar for more serious crimes.
"No mere human being could accomplish this, but I have been assured that a computer could do this in a snap."
Sounds like my manager who seems to have in common with this science fiction writer that they don't understand the first thing about programming.
Creating a program to run through a set of rules described by a '10,000-page monstrosity' is no small feat. Running the program afterwards, yes, that's the easy part.
I agree with your point on Greenpeace reliability completely. Ever since the Brent Spar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Spar) misinformation campaign I take everything they say with a ton of salt.
However, even for individuals and families, it's already possible here in the Netherlands to contract your power supplier to provide you with energy from green sources. No, this does not mean the power to your house is necessarily from solar or wind farms or hydro, but yes, they are obligated by law to buy a x percentage of power from green sources, where x percent is the amount of green power supplied to customers with such contracts.
Big IT power users like datacenters have their own power supplies or have the option choose locales for new centers where green power is readily available.
Moreover, on the hardware side, I imagine it should be possible to lower consumption of servers that are not running at full capacity... most servers seldom do.
"God only knows how you'd classify the Tea Party supporters; "hard right" somehow doesn't seem enough."
I'm not even American, but by what I've heard of this Tea Party, I'd almost call them anarchists. If you take the anti-government stance far enough, that's where you end up.
Also, the latest thing I heard them blabber about was this variation of the Starve-the-Beast idiom, which essentially meant they would forfeit on (international) debt payments and such... that would be the equivalent of the classic old anarchist bom under 'The System'.
"I think due to its vast size and rural areas the US is always going to be lagging behind smaller countries in the latest network technology."
No it's not. See Sweden and Norway for example.
"I'd much rather see a comparison and insight into why Asian countries are so far ahead of the relatively small and well off European nations. There must be some key cultural differences."
Asian countries are not far ahead in comparison to Europe, with the exception of South Korea, which has had internet penetration as a spearpoint in its political policies for the last decade, and is as far ahead of its asian counterparts as it is of its European. The rest of the countries in the top ten are very close in terms of speed and percentual penetration.
"To find a major flaw in the currently accepted and believed theories is considered a scientific breakthrough, not blasphemy or heathen."
This is the theory. In practice, things are not so simple.
Please read Thomas Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for further insight into the scientific process. Kuhn is(was?) a professor of sociology, and studied large scientific revolutions in the past.
In short, he says that each scientific theory comes with its own set of terminology and axioms ( the whole of which he calls a paradigm) and as such large revolutions in science depend more on the social intricacies of science ( which professor adheres to which paradigm? How much is he quoted? Which university does he work for etc etc) than on any rational basis as the differences and pro's and con's of any two paradigm cannot be succesfully compared because of the different theoretical frameworks in which they exists ( lack of understanding between 'believers' due to verbal confusion, lack of willingness to accept axioms of a new paradigm etc).
For small corrections in a specific paradigm, what you say might be true. For larger changes in mindset, it is not.
All true. My personal favorites are larger, long running projects where all of the above is true and all kinds of undocumented business logic is embedded in the code making a rewrite unfeasable and you have to decide which part of the code is outright sloppy or bad, which parts are feasable and which parts aren't actually being used anymore. Top that off with the original developers being unavailable (either dead or fleeing) and you'd be painting a pretty accurate run-of-the-mill software enviroment.
Poster link is on a new rearview mirror shape that eliminates blind spots. However, you can already eliminate blind spots by using an alternative configuration for your mirrors:
I've reconfigured my mirrors some months ago. It takes some getting used to as you cannot see the side of your car in the mirrors anymore, but this setup absolutely eliminates visibility problems when changing lanes etc.
"I think you've run into the flawed thinking process where you assume it is the right way because that is how it has always been. It is called the naturalistic fallacy." Thanks for the suggestion, but no I haven't.
"In response to #2 you suggest that it isn't up to us to decide what to do with THEIR money." No, I meant you singular not plural as in 'we the people'. I'm not arguing that 50+ or even more years after death is overdone; that is cleary of the making of the big corporations and not individual writers. My kids can make their own money, thank you very much.
I don't think we disagree much necessarily, it was just your comparison of writing to a job that I feel is incorrect. Compare it to being a contractor (for writers already bound to a publisher) or to being an entrepeneur (for unpublished writers) if you like, but to compare it to a regular 9-5 job is... well... a falacy.
Slashdot Mirror
"Really? Offensive to whom? Who decides what is 'hate-speech'?"
The people that feel offended enough to make a case out of it, on which a court of law decides. It's simple.
"You should have a right to hate someone, and have the right to proclaim your hatred."
Sure, but there's a difference between unintentionally causing offense and willingly doing so by targeting an individual. That last is distastefull and should be punishable IMHO.
It's like the difference between stating that you hate people who commit suicide or trolling like said person in the UK did.
You might not have noticed, but most of Europe does _not_ speak English. In dutch it's known as Informatica, in French as informatique, in Spanish as Informatica and in german as Informatik.
I'll leave it up to you and your arse to google translate the word into the rest of Europe's 20+ languages.
Yeah, because putting pressure on Neelie Smit-Kroes proved sooo usefull in the Microsoft anti-trust case e.g.
Due to internal politics in the EU she's no longer Competition Commissioner, but believe me, pressurizing her does not work well.
She has really done a wealth of good for competition and the free market in Europe and has dealt with the largest and meanest corporations and governments without budging one inch.
Yeah or maybe vegans are the only ones to have sane bacteria and there is some germ pulling meat-eaters ropes to make them feed up on the ol' red meat.
"I was disappointed by this comment:
The findings "open up very exciting speculation" about using probiotics to treat mood disorders in people, says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, Los Angeles."
Me too. I'm surprised this is news to a gastroenterologist. I though it was well known that other, non-biotic, inhabitants influence the mind too. Very nasty if you have candadiasis, which is an out of control growth of this critter.
"A few days ago, a couple from Europe died of heat stroke in Death Valley. The local temperature was 105 degrees fahrenheit, which was low for that place in this time of year. In places I've lived, 105 degrees is a nice day. But since two people died, does that mean the weather was catastrophic? Well, if you look at the translated pages from their home town, yeah, they were getting all hysterical because these people were out in 41c weather. I guess where you happen to live, that can seem like a lot."
The couple was from Tilburg, Netherlands and as the manager of a well-known culture podium his death got a lot of coverage. Although we have no deserts here obviously 41 degrees celsius is not so extreme and the hysterical coverage you speak of, well, I haven't noticed it.
Looks to me the guy and his girlfriend didn't take the correct precautions (driving a normal car on a 4x4 track, not having enough water) and paid the price.
Of course, you living in California must mean you'll be roughing it all the time and wouldn't make stupid mistakes like underestimating the severity of say ... an earthquake. Would you?
Yeah, especially 5.
Using the courts to stifle a competitor is cheap.
I thought Apple prided itself on making better products, but by bringing these cases before a judge they admit they are not competing on quality anymore.
Weird. I've had almost the same experience switching from Enlightenment to WindowMaker to KDE to GNOME to Unity. Not wanting to tweak every and all settings anymore. Growing out of the compile-my-own-kernel mode.
But your solution ... OSX? I wouldn't think of using OSX as the times I've had to navigate it on friends computers it seemed totally counter-inituitive to me ...
I actually like Unity. It seems I'm one of the few. It's clean, simple, fast, doesn't get in my way ... actually to me it feels like going back to WindowMaker, but this time with a filemanager and without having to configure settings manually.
I'm actually incredibly happy about Unity ditching all menu's ... I really don't like menu's in OS (in applications is another story), never can find anything, always have to look twice even if I know where the item is.
If fear of punishment is your only reason not to transgress, you've got some pretty shady morals.
I agree. I think there are sideeffects with the zero tolerance punishment based punitive systems that might be responsible for higher crime rates in the U.S.
If you punish minor crimes like shoplifting or using drugs with prison sentences, you are effectively training better criminals. In prison there are plenty of people to learn them the fine tricks of e.g. auto theft or such and their doing prison time does not make them good candidates on the regular job market.
Also, if you can get punished with years of prison sentence for something trivial like pot-smoking, this effectively lowers the bar for more serious crimes.
"I just hope no one takes your post seriously."
So, you've already convicted him it seems. Maybe we should just call off the trial and lynch him right away, shall we?
You are aware that there is a difference between a womanizer and a rapist, are you?
And that, being a womanizer, a rape charge would be the preferred vector of attack for any professional clandestine organization.
I'm not saying I'm convinced either way, but both him being a rapist and him being framed are quite plausibel.
How are these tents built up? Is this just a canvas tent, no insulation whatever?
That would be rather ... stupid. It should be quite simple to construct something portable with at least a modicum of insulation.
"No mere human being could accomplish this, but I have been assured that a computer could do this in a snap."
Sounds like my manager who seems to have in common with this science fiction writer that they don't understand the first thing about programming.
Creating a program to run through a set of rules described by a '10,000-page monstrosity' is no small feat. Running the program afterwards, yes, that's the easy part.
Quick, if all of us put in our 0.01 cents on this we can still outbid Microsoft!
I agree with your point on Greenpeace reliability completely. Ever since the Brent Spar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Spar) misinformation campaign I take everything they say with a ton of salt.
However, even for individuals and families, it's already possible here in the Netherlands to contract your power supplier to provide you with energy from green sources. No, this does not mean the power to your house is necessarily from solar or wind farms or hydro, but yes, they are obligated by law to buy a x percentage of power from green sources, where x percent is the amount of green power supplied to customers with such contracts.
Big IT power users like datacenters have their own power supplies or have the option choose locales for new centers where green power is readily available.
Moreover, on the hardware side, I imagine it should be possible to lower consumption of servers that are not running at full capacity ... most servers seldom do.
Yup. The only reason they promoted a ban was because the FSB did not yet know of any methods of doing thus with Skype, Gmail etc.
Retraction is probably because their kind 'friends' at the American or Chinese government informed them of the available methods.
"Anyone who writes in PHP probably is using it because it's the easiest option.."
And this is wrong why?
"God only knows how you'd classify the Tea Party supporters; "hard right" somehow doesn't seem enough."
I'm not even American, but by what I've heard of this Tea Party, I'd almost call them anarchists. If you take the anti-government stance far enough, that's where you end up.
Also, the latest thing I heard them blabber about was this variation of the Starve-the-Beast idiom, which essentially meant they would forfeit on (international) debt payments and such ... that would be the equivalent of the classic old anarchist bom under 'The System'.
"I think due to its vast size and rural areas the US is always going to be lagging behind smaller countries in the latest network technology."
No it's not. See Sweden and Norway for example.
"I'd much rather see a comparison and insight into why Asian countries are so far ahead of the relatively small and well off European nations. There must be some key cultural differences."
Asian countries are not far ahead in comparison to Europe, with the exception of South Korea, which has had internet penetration as a spearpoint in its political policies for the last decade, and is as far ahead of its asian counterparts as it is of its European. The rest of the countries in the top ten are very close in terms of speed and percentual penetration.
http://www.techpark.net/2010/04/15/broadband-internet-speeds-2009-2010-the-top-10-countries/
"To find a major flaw in the currently accepted and believed theories is considered a scientific breakthrough, not blasphemy or heathen."
This is the theory. In practice, things are not so simple.
Please read Thomas Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for further insight into the scientific process. Kuhn is(was?) a professor of sociology, and studied large scientific revolutions in the past.
In short, he says that each scientific theory comes with its own set of terminology and axioms ( the whole of which he calls a paradigm) and as such large revolutions in science depend more on the social intricacies of science ( which professor adheres to which paradigm? How much is he quoted? Which university does he work for etc etc) than on any rational basis as the differences and pro's and con's of any two paradigm cannot be succesfully compared because of the different theoretical frameworks in which they exists ( lack of understanding between 'believers' due to verbal confusion, lack of willingness to accept axioms of a new paradigm etc).
For small corrections in a specific paradigm, what you say might be true. For larger changes in mindset, it is not.
OMG! Titties! Fellow Americans, please avert your eyes off this European Godless smut!
He must have been present at the scene of the 'crime'.
All true. My personal favorites are larger, long running projects where all of the above is true and all kinds of undocumented business logic is embedded in the code making a rewrite unfeasable and you have to decide which part of the code is outright sloppy or bad, which parts are feasable and which parts aren't actually being used anymore. Top that off with the original developers being unavailable (either dead or fleeing) and you'd be painting a pretty accurate run-of-the-mill software enviroment.
Poster link is on a new rearview mirror shape that eliminates blind spots. However, you can already eliminate blind spots by using an alternative configuration for your mirrors:
http://www.wikihow.com/Set-Rearview-Mirrors-to-Eliminate-Blind-Spots
I've reconfigured my mirrors some months ago. It takes some getting used to as you cannot see the side of your car in the mirrors anymore, but this setup absolutely eliminates visibility problems when changing lanes etc.
"I think you've run into the flawed thinking process where you assume it is the right way because that is how it has always been. It is called the naturalistic fallacy."
Thanks for the suggestion, but no I haven't.
"In response to #2 you suggest that it isn't up to us to decide what to do with THEIR money."
No, I meant you singular not plural as in 'we the people'. I'm not arguing that 50+ or even more years after death is overdone; that is cleary of the making of the big corporations and not individual writers. My kids can make their own money, thank you very much.
I don't think we disagree much necessarily, it was just your comparison of writing to a job that I feel is incorrect. Compare it to being a contractor (for writers already bound to a publisher) or to being an entrepeneur (for unpublished writers) if you like, but to compare it to a regular 9-5 job is ... well ... a falacy.