Yeah, but even if you read the Bible yourself (and believe it contains some thing higher that an assortment of random stories and prejudices from iron age nomads), you've still got to decide for yourself whether to concentrate on the bits about "Love thy neighbor" bits or the bits about killing everyone in the enemy city, even the babies.
"Somehow I doubt the leaders of Scienotology believe what they preach."
Unclear. Regarding the original leaders, I'm inclined to agree with you; but such a top core of people who understand it's a scam must necessarily be a very small group, and they've been dying off. So as time goes on one expects more leaders will be drawn from actual believers. On the other hand, I'm not convinced very many followers of mainstream religions really believe all the wacky stuff they're supposed to.
But frankly, trying to distinguish cult/religion by such criteria strikes me as academic and ultimately pointless. By my reckoning, there's no fundamental difference. They all believe absurdities. But I try not to judge people too harshly just on that basis, because most of the world believes one absurd thing or another. I try to judge them by what they do. As it was put, um, *somewhere*, "You shall know them by their works"...
When Christians do good things and give the credit to God, I fault them for excessive humility. This is uniquely easy to forgive.
When people try to tell me how to live my life, or take money from the vulnerable, etc. I don't much care what stupid idea inspired them.
Though I'm generally suspicious of radical go-all-the-way solutions like not being military allies with anyone, I understand where you are coming from, and don't entirely disagree.
But...
"Iraq is the least of our military perception problems."
Actually, I'm pretty convinced Iraq is our number one biggest military problem, both perceptual and actual, bar none. If we're going to talk about how we should be pulling back from the rest of the world militarily, there is one completely obvious place to start.
Were I an idealist, I might support someone who says they want to pull out of everywhere, but has no chance of actually getting it done. As a pragmatist, I'm going to support someone who will actually get us out of Iraq.
"So when I try to play my DVD film on windows, or AAC files, or watch a quicktime video in the browser, visit a flash website, or try to open a microsoft office document on vanilla windows, it has failed and I should buy a different OS?"
If you try to do something and it doesn't work, it has failed; I think that is obvious. I didn't say you should get a different OS on that basis. (If you are running Windows, I might recommend getting a different OS in any case, but that is quite specifically beside the point).
I recognize, acknowledge, and agree that the reasons Windows succeeds in ways that Linux fails (such as the two mentioned by the poster I replied to) are generally the result of issues that are not technical issues; They are advantages born from MS's position in the market, and unfair exploitation thereof.
The point you seem to be making it that the reasons that Joe User perceives Linux to be not as good as Windows are not fair reasons. I think that's entirely correct.
The Fine Article suggests the reason Joe User perceives Linux to be not as good as Windows is because it doesn't cost as much. I think that's bullshit.
And while the serious atrocities committed in the name of Christianity were mostly a while ago, they were also a heck of a lot more serious than anything Scientology has achieved (not because Scientology is nice, but because it doesn't control any Countries yet).
Frankly, unless you start out believing it, the Christianity stuff sounds like pure BS too. Christianity just has a big enough critical mass that a large population actually is brought up believing it.
Do note that when you look at the practical end result; the actual ways to behave toward ones fellow human beings that many Christians get out of their religion, it's great: they're nice people, and thus drawn to traditions that tell them it's good to be nice. Performing the same analysis on Scientology yields considerably more troubling and scary results.
But it's not because their ideas are any less weird. They both believe wacky things that can be used to justify whatever behavior you want.
But my larger point remains; if you get as far as physically installing a card in a windows box, and trying to get it to work, you're not going to find at that point that the driver for that card doesn't exist for Windows.
Fair enough, Windows fails on ogg files, Linux fails on mp3. Which one do you think Joe User clicked on?
If you're just trying to tell me Linux is cool, and the reasons Joe User hasn't adopted it terribly fast are in some sense stupid and unfair, well, I agree with all that.
If you're trying to tell me those reasons are not just stupid or unfair, but don't actually exist, I disagree.
Who are these people who upgrade Windows? Even I, a bona-fide mega-geek, just run the version it came with on my Windows boxes; if I'm going to mess with the OS, I'll install Linux. My non-techie friends probably wouldn't realize it's possible to upgrade an operating systems.
I'm a Linux user and fan, but if we're going to discuss why Linux hasn't spread faster than it has, let's not be disingenuous:
You double-click the icon, you get music or you don't; If you didn't, it failed. You can research why it failed, it might even be easy to research, but it already failed.
As for the wireless, what would you do if you had a wireless card that couldn't work under Windows? Send it back as a hardware failure; There aren't any wireless cards that don't support Windows.
You're right, we should do something that makes no sense, and clearly wouldn't work any of the time, because the alternative is obviously to do nothing.
If porn sites want to put porn-related keywords in their headers they can. If search engines want to offer filtering based on those keywords they can. In fact, this occurs today..xxx is nothing but a less nuanced, more expensive version of this system.
Alternatively because they can count, and could thus determine that a conviction in the Senate would not occur, so impeachment would be pointless and they didn't want to waste of the countries time.
One could conclude that the relevant Republican Congress wanted to pointlessly waste the countries time. I like to be charitable though, so I remain open to the possibility that they were just too stupid to ever learn how to count.
What American city do you suggest is just as bad as Mogadisu? I've not been to Mogadisu, but from what I do know of it, I'd rather live in any American city whatsoever.
You contrast two ideas: That blacks are genetically inferior, and that a 90% tax rate would be a good idea. Both are clearly stupid ideas on the merits, there is no evidence either is true, there is plenty of evidence both are false. One is offensive and stupid, while the other is merely stupid, so while claiming blacks are inferior might cause some to dismiss you on the basis of offensiveness alone, they'd be equally justified in dismissing you on the merits.
Frankly, I'm mystified that you think the reception of either of these ideas would be substantially different amongst any US political group with more than 1% support. Both ideas are obvious idiocy, and wasting any time debating them would be dumb.
"Welfare has turned inner cities into crime ridden Third World hellholes."
Having lived in a couple of the worst inner cities in the US, and visited the third world, I can tell you haven't.
"Open debate only works when no possibility is dismissed out of hand."
What a ridiculous statement. Let us consider at length the possibility that your brain is made of turnips. We can't have an open debate if we dismiss this out of hand. Do you think trepanation would be the best route for investigation?
"Push the mouse forward and you look down, jut like you push your head forward to look down. To look up you pull your head(mouse) back."
Push the mouse forward and you look up, jut like you push your chin forward to look up. To look down you push your chin (mouse) back. The mapping of the forward-backward axis of the mouse to the up-down axis of the screen is entirely arbitrary. I've yet to meet an inverted-y fan who didn't learn in flight sims.
Of course, what really annoys me about some FPS games is expecting me to remember & find more than about 8 buttons...
But whether you share a very large pipe with some of your neighbors, or have a smaller pipe all to yourself, both those pipes lead quite quickly to a junction, and from there out you're sharing a bigger pipe with a much bigger number of people. The size vs user population of that upstream pipe is almost certainly a much bigger deal during peak times than the size of your last mile pipe. All the discussion of trade-offs between cable/dsl is mostly irrelevant, and driven by DSL salespeople. Because "Not as good as cable, but good enough for you!" is a crappy slogan, no matter how accurate.
The amount of bandwidth a providers has further upstream is generally a much bigger deal than any differences between cable/dsl. I'd also coinsider whether your cable provider does sucky stuff like that discussed in the article. Sadly, my possible dsl provider does different sucky stuff; sigh. To the limited extent that the differences between cable and DSL matter at all, cable pretty much just wins.
Our understanding of the world is, and will always be, approximate.
Science is a process by which we improve that approximation. Nothing we used to know is now wrong. Some things we used to roughly understand we now understand better.
It appears that the Eukaryotes emerged sometime over a billion years ago. As far back as we could figure out, it looked like there were five groups of them, but we didn't understand which of those groups were more closely related to each other. Further research has now refined our approximation, and it appears two of those groups are more closely related that the rest.
So, certain single-celled organisms are understood to be more closely related to certain other single celled organisms than previously thought. Compared to any of the organisms involved, you're still more closely related to certain other single celled organisms, as well as all animals and fungi. If that shakes your world view, you need to get out more.:)
The relevant question is: "Do they have any significant political power?" You, and the summary, seem to be trying to suggest that the answer is "yes". That is also false.
In the US, there are dozens of political parties, but people only talk about two of them, and for good reason. In Sweden, there are dozens of political parties; maybe 6 or 7 are worth talking about, and the Pirate Party isn't one of them.
The question was about drives from home computers, not corporate CA servers.
I don't keep my computer disconnected from the network inside a locked bank vault. Given that, there are far more likely threats to any and all data on my hard drive than someone resurrecting it after I've erased it and overwritten it.
The garbage man's computer-wiz kid going around trying to resurrect broken drives at random? I've heard of some really bad movie plots, but nothing that stupid.
"salvagers can't do something easy like moving the platters to a working drive and just finding stuff you didn't know was there."
Give me a break. You don't know it's there, and you're worried the garbage man is going to take the time and money to buy the same model of drive, swap the platters (in his basement clean room) and try to recover your data, just in case maybe he can get a credit card number? I think he's a bit more likely to dig through peoples trash for discarded credit card receipts. Heck, how many waitresses and retail clerks did you hand your credit card to last year?
No reason not to write random data to the disk if you like. But if it's 99% of home computer data, physically destroying perfectly good drives is stupidly wasteful.
"It's not clear what 'positive' and 'negative' mean in this context."
Of course it is. A positive is an actual terrorist, negatives are everybody else.
"Suppose these techniques reveal something but the searches reveal nothing."
That's a false positive. Nobody is talking about arresting anyone, which would obviously be stupid.
"I would hope we would have some minimal requirements that such 'special screening'..."
That's what we're talking about, but it's plenty to make this technique stupid. There are a few actual positives out of a few billion actual negatives. Even a ridiculously low false positive rate will be plenty to make this an utterly pointless waste of time. Identifying terrorists at security checkpoints by looking at them is just not a doable thing.
I disagree. My contention is that the ability to do the one implies the ability to do the other.
I mean, you could make it so we didn't legally call it "transferring the copyright". But if I keep the copyright, but grant the right to make copies to you and to anyone you name, and agree not to grant that right to anyone else, and hire you to act as my agent in enforcing my copyright, etc.... What's the difference?
What do you propose forbidding creators from doing that "transferring" copyright does let them do?
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Yeah, but even if you read the Bible yourself (and believe it contains some thing higher that an assortment of random stories and prejudices from iron age nomads), you've still got to decide for yourself whether to concentrate on the bits about "Love thy neighbor" bits or the bits about killing everyone in the enemy city, even the babies.
"Somehow I doubt the leaders of Scienotology believe what they preach."
Unclear. Regarding the original leaders, I'm inclined to agree with you; but such a top core of people who understand it's a scam must necessarily be a very small group, and they've been dying off. So as time goes on one expects more leaders will be drawn from actual believers. On the other hand, I'm not convinced very many followers of mainstream religions really believe all the wacky stuff they're supposed to.
But frankly, trying to distinguish cult/religion by such criteria strikes me as academic and ultimately pointless. By my reckoning, there's no fundamental difference. They all believe absurdities. But I try not to judge people too harshly just on that basis, because most of the world believes one absurd thing or another. I try to judge them by what they do. As it was put, um, *somewhere*, "You shall know them by their works"...
When Christians do good things and give the credit to God, I fault them for excessive humility. This is uniquely easy to forgive.
When people try to tell me how to live my life, or take money from the vulnerable, etc. I don't much care what stupid idea inspired them.
Though I'm generally suspicious of radical go-all-the-way solutions like not being military allies with anyone, I understand where you are coming from, and don't entirely disagree.
But...
"Iraq is the least of our military perception problems."
Actually, I'm pretty convinced Iraq is our number one biggest military problem, both perceptual and actual, bar none. If we're going to talk about how we should be pulling back from the rest of the world militarily, there is one completely obvious place to start.
Were I an idealist, I might support someone who says they want to pull out of everywhere, but has no chance of actually getting it done. As a pragmatist, I'm going to support someone who will actually get us out of Iraq.
"So when I try to play my DVD film on windows, or AAC files, or watch a quicktime video in the browser, visit a flash website, or try to open a microsoft office document on vanilla windows, it has failed and I should buy a different OS?"
If you try to do something and it doesn't work, it has failed; I think that is obvious. I didn't say you should get a different OS on that basis. (If you are running Windows, I might recommend getting a different OS in any case, but that is quite specifically beside the point).
I recognize, acknowledge, and agree that the reasons Windows succeeds in ways that Linux fails (such as the two mentioned by the poster I replied to) are generally the result of issues that are not technical issues; They are advantages born from MS's position in the market, and unfair exploitation thereof.
The point you seem to be making it that the reasons that Joe User perceives Linux to be not as good as Windows are not fair reasons. I think that's entirely correct.
The Fine Article suggests the reason Joe User perceives Linux to be not as good as Windows is because it doesn't cost as much. I think that's bullshit.
And while the serious atrocities committed in the name of Christianity were mostly a while ago, they were also a heck of a lot more serious than anything Scientology has achieved (not because Scientology is nice, but because it doesn't control any Countries yet).
Frankly, unless you start out believing it, the Christianity stuff sounds like pure BS too. Christianity just has a big enough critical mass that a large population actually is brought up believing it.
Do note that when you look at the practical end result; the actual ways to behave toward ones fellow human beings that many Christians get out of their religion, it's great: they're nice people, and thus drawn to traditions that tell them it's good to be nice. Performing the same analysis on Scientology yields considerably more troubling and scary results.
But it's not because their ideas are any less weird. They both believe wacky things that can be used to justify whatever behavior you want.
Touche.
But my larger point remains; if you get as far as physically installing a card in a windows box, and trying to get it to work, you're not going to find at that point that the driver for that card doesn't exist for Windows.
Fair enough, Windows fails on ogg files, Linux fails on mp3. Which one do you think Joe User clicked on?
If you're just trying to tell me Linux is cool, and the reasons Joe User hasn't adopted it terribly fast are in some sense stupid and unfair, well, I agree with all that.
If you're trying to tell me those reasons are not just stupid or unfair, but don't actually exist, I disagree.
Who are these people who upgrade Windows? Even I, a bona-fide mega-geek, just run the version it came with on my Windows boxes; if I'm going to mess with the OS, I'll install Linux. My non-techie friends probably wouldn't realize it's possible to upgrade an operating systems.
I'm a Linux user and fan, but if we're going to discuss why Linux hasn't spread faster than it has, let's not be disingenuous:
You double-click the icon, you get music or you don't; If you didn't, it failed. You can research why it failed, it might even be easy to research, but it already failed.
As for the wireless, what would you do if you had a wireless card that couldn't work under Windows? Send it back as a hardware failure; There aren't any wireless cards that don't support Windows.
You're right, we should do something that makes no sense, and clearly wouldn't work any of the time, because the alternative is obviously to do nothing.
.xxx is nothing but a less nuanced, more expensive version of this system.
If porn sites want to put porn-related keywords in their headers they can. If search engines want to offer filtering based on those keywords they can. In fact, this occurs today.
Partly because they are wusses.
Alternatively because they can count, and could thus determine that a conviction in the Senate would not occur, so impeachment would be pointless and they didn't want to waste of the countries time.
One could conclude that the relevant Republican Congress wanted to pointlessly waste the countries time. I like to be charitable though, so I remain open to the possibility that they were just too stupid to ever learn how to count.
What American city do you suggest is just as bad as Mogadisu? I've not been to Mogadisu, but from what I do know of it, I'd rather live in any American city whatsoever.
You contrast two ideas: That blacks are genetically inferior, and that a 90% tax rate would be a good idea. Both are clearly stupid ideas on the merits, there is no evidence either is true, there is plenty of evidence both are false. One is offensive and stupid, while the other is merely stupid, so while claiming blacks are inferior might cause some to dismiss you on the basis of offensiveness alone, they'd be equally justified in dismissing you on the merits.
Frankly, I'm mystified that you think the reception of either of these ideas would be substantially different amongst any US political group with more than 1% support. Both ideas are obvious idiocy, and wasting any time debating them would be dumb.
"Welfare has turned inner cities into crime ridden Third World hellholes."
Having lived in a couple of the worst inner cities in the US, and visited the third world, I can tell you haven't.
"Open debate only works when no possibility is dismissed out of hand."
What a ridiculous statement. Let us consider at length the possibility that your brain is made of turnips. We can't have an open debate if we dismiss this out of hand. Do you think trepanation would be the best route for investigation?
"Push the mouse forward and you look down, jut like you push your head forward to look down. To look up you pull your head(mouse) back."
Push the mouse forward and you look up, jut like you push your chin forward to look up. To look down you push your chin (mouse) back. The mapping of the forward-backward axis of the mouse to the up-down axis of the screen is entirely arbitrary. I've yet to meet an inverted-y fan who didn't learn in flight sims.
Of course, what really annoys me about some FPS games is expecting me to remember & find more than about 8 buttons...
But whether you share a very large pipe with some of your neighbors, or have a smaller pipe all to yourself, both those pipes lead quite quickly to a junction, and from there out you're sharing a bigger pipe with a much bigger number of people. The size vs user population of that upstream pipe is almost certainly a much bigger deal during peak times than the size of your last mile pipe. All the discussion of trade-offs between cable/dsl is mostly irrelevant, and driven by DSL salespeople. Because "Not as good as cable, but good enough for you!" is a crappy slogan, no matter how accurate.
The amount of bandwidth a providers has further upstream is generally a much bigger deal than any differences between cable/dsl. I'd also coinsider whether your cable provider does sucky stuff like that discussed in the article. Sadly, my possible dsl provider does different sucky stuff; sigh. To the limited extent that the differences between cable and DSL matter at all, cable pretty much just wins.
I came up through several of the same environments you did.
I get a lot more done now that better tools exist.
Our understanding of the world is, and will always be, approximate.
Science is a process by which we improve that approximation. Nothing we used to know is now wrong. Some things we used to roughly understand we now understand better.
It appears that the Eukaryotes emerged sometime over a billion years ago. As far back as we could figure out, it looked like there were five groups of them, but we didn't understand which of those groups were more closely related to each other. Further research has now refined our approximation, and it appears two of those groups are more closely related that the rest.
So, certain single-celled organisms are understood to be more closely related to certain other single celled organisms than previously thought. Compared to any of the organisms involved, you're still more closely related to certain other single celled organisms, as well as all animals and fungi. If that shakes your world view, you need to get out more.
The relevant question is: "Do they have any significant political power?"
You, and the summary, seem to be trying to suggest that the answer is "yes". That is also false.
In the US, there are dozens of political parties, but people only talk about two of them, and for good reason. In Sweden, there are dozens of political parties; maybe 6 or 7 are worth talking about, and the Pirate Party isn't one of them.
You think their keyboards a weird? You should hear them talk! Those wacky French have a different word for, like, everything!
The question was about drives from home computers, not corporate CA servers.
I don't keep my computer disconnected from the network inside a locked bank vault. Given that, there are far more likely threats to any and all data on my hard drive than someone resurrecting it after I've erased it and overwritten it.
The garbage man's computer-wiz kid going around trying to resurrect broken drives at random? I've heard of some really bad movie plots, but nothing that stupid.
"salvagers can't do something easy like moving the platters to a working drive and just finding stuff you didn't know was there."
Give me a break. You don't know it's there, and you're worried the garbage man is going to take the time and money to buy the same model of drive, swap the platters (in his basement clean room) and try to recover your data, just in case maybe he can get a credit card number? I think he's a bit more likely to dig through peoples trash for discarded credit card receipts. Heck, how many waitresses and retail clerks did you hand your credit card to last year?
No reason not to write random data to the disk if you like. But if it's 99% of home computer data, physically destroying perfectly good drives is stupidly wasteful.
It's in the heat-death-of-the-univese-is-nothing range.
.25 seconds per domain I get: 5,175,715,020,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
At your
Also point out to them the wonderful virtues of our educational system, that provided you with such fine reading comprehension.
"It's not clear what 'positive' and 'negative' mean in this context."
Of course it is. A positive is an actual terrorist, negatives are everybody else.
"Suppose these techniques reveal something but the searches reveal nothing."
That's a false positive. Nobody is talking about arresting anyone, which would obviously be stupid.
"I would hope we would have some minimal requirements that such 'special screening'..."
That's what we're talking about, but it's plenty to make this technique stupid. There are a few actual positives out of a few billion actual negatives. Even a ridiculously low false positive rate will be plenty to make this an utterly pointless waste of time. Identifying terrorists at security checkpoints by looking at them is just not a doable thing.
I disagree. My contention is that the ability to do the one implies the ability to do the other.
... What's the difference?
I mean, you could make it so we didn't legally call it "transferring the copyright". But if I keep the copyright, but grant the right to make copies to you and to anyone you name, and agree not to grant that right to anyone else, and hire you to act as my agent in enforcing my copyright, etc.
What do you propose forbidding creators from doing that "transferring" copyright does let them do?
We're talking about 10 year old software. I can "sandbox" the entire computer it ran on dozen of times over.