Anyone that is going on about the possibility or probability of particular kinds of tech existing or co-existing has not understood the point of Science Fiction. Period.
The End of Eternity (Asimov) is basically a book about human character. We go extinct because we're too sheltered and without struggle we can't live. The Star Trek series always talked about socio-political issues, like in the episode about the culture that had mandatory Euthanasia at ~60. Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) is about censorship. Censorship is bad, m'kay? And likewise all good science fiction really talks about philosophical topics like morals, culture, identity, life and the universe.
Having said that, BSG is a series which deals with human character. The drive for self-realization vs survival of the flock/species is quite central in it all, along with various other psychological traits we have. The first season of BSG was excellent and it being excellent had nothing to do with "cool stuff blowing up in space". Dune wasn't about ornithopters either. It was about politics and religion, if it's even possible to separate the two.
Then again, so did the "Virgin" Mary. The original texts in Hebrew about the circumstances of Jesus' birth described Mary as a "young woman" which got mis-translated into Greek with the word "Virgin". After ~380 years of debate, the RC Church finally decided (I don't recall where the papal edict was issued) on Jesus' divinity and the existence of the Holy Trinity.
Therefore, if Jesus actually existed it is more than likely that Mary got fucked. Proper fucked? Yes, proper fucked.
As for the rest of us? We got screwed too. Not just by whatever sex-partners we've had, but predominantly by the RC Church and whatever offspring it had.
Actually it's the Berliner Motor Werkstadt, which used to be an airplane engine factory, hence the rotor-blade design of the logo. While I agree some BMW drivers are indeed tossers, I don't see a causal link between tosser-dom and BMW-driving.
I live in Israel where everyone in a motorized vehicle seems to be a braindead wanker if driving style is indicative. And they do just fine in Mazda 3's, Hyundai Getz's and other small, beat-up cars.
You cannot blame the company for its clientele's behaviour in a subset of the geographies they sell to. Now abbreviations like FIAT meaning "Fix It Again, Tony!" are funny, because they actually talk about the properties of, say, my FIAT Tipo in the nineties.
Sure. So most German car manufacturers like Audi, VW, BMW and Mercedes will give you 10+ years of warranty on the chassis of the car because they all know that their cars will turn to rust in 5 or 6 years?
Now the body work, that's interesting... Most European cars nowadays will have more plastic for body work than anything else, if you look at Renault for instance, it's pure plastic. This is done to protect the driver and fellow road users on impact. The car will simply shred.
As an added bonus, since it's Not Metal (TM), it don't rust. BMW is currently investigating the use of cloth, enforced with carbon, which can shape-shift for their bodies, so I'm really wondering what the hell you're basing your claims on.
Now I'm not going to diss on KIA. I've been driving a Hyundai i30 to great satisfaction for a while, and lord knows Toyota's never ever break, so I have no beef with Asian cars. I do however observe that KIA and Mazda are behind on their materials. Toyota and Honda aren't, or less so, but KIA, Hyundai and Mazda feel a lot more "Tin-Can-ish" than their modern European counterparts.
IANACE though. I am not a car expert though. But then I don't make categorical statements without any back up.:-D
Right. My employer is rolling out Vista by the bucket load, and the colleagues I've heard about this say:
- Looks great - Some networking bits hard to find / through wizards / bleh - Networking does work great except for the explorer flaw thingy - Hibernate / sleep work very well, and very reliably - Performs great (mind you, I'm typing this on a relatively new 6910p notebook)
So you have seen *one* Vista laptop. The brand/model of which you're not disclosing. And you don't mention if it's Vista or SP1, or what you did to it. If I were you I would think again, because in my organization there are thousands of Vista laptops, and I have yet to hear a complaint about the hibernate/sleep functions.
Again, I'm not a microsoft fanboi. I would like to run Linux but it's too much bloody tinkering to get it to do what I want. I don't like package management, thinking about dependencies, tweaking things for years and generally scrolling through text files to configure certain things. Those are things I do for work, not when I'm trying to watch a house episode, look at pictures or surf the net. Linux, at present, is a great server OS.
Although frankly I would not like to run Mac OS/X because of the interface, I will get a Mac Mini as a DVD player / entertainment system linked to my LCD TV and receiver. That cute little remote really does it for me. It's great, small, silent and sexy. What can one say?
Having said that, I still want Vista / XP or whatever windows they throw at me next on my desktop. Because it does what I want it to, and since XP it does it really well, actually. My 6910p laptop with the extra horse-shoe battery just plain rocks. It's not the smallest of laptops, but I can work for 5.5 or 6 hours without juice and it does things well with some decent screen real-estate and a nice-sized keyboard.
Now I double-dare anyone to come and tell me I'm a brainless consumer. Really. I'm simply an IT professional that wants a hammer when he's driving nails, a screwdriver when he's screwing screws and a drill when he's making holes.
If XP is end of life and Windows 7 is supported, it's already better right there. Sorry to say this mate, but I have a vague feeling Windows 7 will be better regardless.
Currently I'm running Vista on my corporate desktop, and I'm not unhappy about it. The only gripe I have with the platform is that network discovery is done every time you open Windows explorer.
If I hibernate / sleep while on the corporate network, and I wake up that thing at home, opening an explorer window will take ~20 seconds because it tries to access the previously mapped network drives. This should be done out of band or potentially not at all in my view, not *every* bloody time you open an explorer. It's a bad implementation.
Apart from that the GUI is nice, the Networking menus are a pain in the backside, and XP's control panel was better. However, it manages sleep / hibernation more nicely and runs very (dare I say it) stable with the software suite I need.
To cut a long story short, I've been with Windows since 1.0x and I can tell you that in general the quality of the OS has been going up steadily. Vista is not perfect, but it's a *lot* nicer than NT4, 2000 for the desktop, 98, 95. Whether it's better than XP is somewhat debatable, but in the end it's a tight race. All in all, the trend is upwards.
Now Windows 7 or whatever the new iteration for the Desktop will be, will likely be better than XP indeed. Anyone who claims different probably hasn't paid attention to MicroSoft's history.
The thing is that this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously you'll easily and frequently hear "Upgrade myth busted", "Linux to dominate world in 2009" and "w00t!". The truth is that MicroSoft isn't all bad, and neither is Linux, but at the end of the day I do believe people will skip Vista to some degree (ME anyone?) only to hop on board at the next iteration again.
Which is not necessarily bad for the market or the consumers.
I think that the credit crisis as sparked by the US sub-prime mortgage fiasco has amply illustrated what happens when you actually trust "The Market" and let it fly without regulating it. If you do not put up rules, people will tend to get screwed to a much larger degree. So you can stick your anarcho-capitalism where the sun don't shine as far as I'm concerned.
The fact that you say education is not a right is somewhat revolting for me, and that's for purely selfish reasons, as a matter of fact. Let's say I live in The Netherlands, which is a parliamentary consensus democracy. Now I'd like us to think about the concept of not considering education a right, and therefore taking it away, and making it available only to those that can pay for it. All of a sudden, the electorate of the country (and remember, it's a consensus democracy) turns into an unruly, uneducated, overly religious, burger-flipping, channel hopping, overweight, consumerist mob.... oh..... wait.... we already have that.... it's called the USA.
Obviously, your statement was nuanced differently than mine. When I said survival and reproduction are essential, to me that means the ability to survive long enough to reproduce one's gene-set as well as facilitating the survival of your offspring so they can pass on that set of genes.
Secondly, when I said physical survival is commonplace, I meant that mere physical strength or a capacity towards violence will not necessarily make you more or less successful at reproducing in today's society, which changes the ballgame quite a bit.
And lastly, I don't see why you say "if we were to" in that sentence. We already reproduce with the same enthusiasm that we kill others with. If we are to stand a chance of surviving as a species, we either need to branch out into space or we need to find a way to curb our reproduction. It's either that or drastically increasing the killing bit.
Having said that, we are now self-aware and we are aware of quite a few of the principles that drive evolution, so you could argue that we are starting to get into the position where we can engineer our evolution, for better or worse.
First of all, plenty of Christians have killed and will kill a non-believer. It's documented well, and countless times.
Funnily enough 10% of Jews in Israel *will* also stone your ass if you drive through a particular street on a Shabat, if you happen be Palestinian and live near certain settlers and if you dare to drive/eat/smoke in their vicinity on a Yom Kippur.
Believe me. I live here. The latter example actually took place in Akko recently. An Arab drove through Akko (which is an Arabic city), ended up on a Jewish street, got stones thrown at his car and subsequently *he* was arrested for it.
Then there are the boys who immigrate from Russia who get bullied into circumcising themselves at the age of 20 by their peers in the Army. That one's about brainwashing *and* self-mutilation as a consequence of it, and that's still done by the more secular Jews, that's not even the work of your 10% of orthodox fringe idiots.
Now my boy would be considered Jewish because his mother is an Israeli Jewess, so don't come to me and cry anti-semitism for what I've just pointed out either, please.
Having said that, I think the Christians should be very, very quiet about the Muslims killing those who are not Muslim because we all know what religion brought on the Spanish Inquisition, which hunts, the 100 year war, the Crusades and many other calamities that were aimed towards non-believers.
In 1987 George Bush Sr said an atheist can never be considered a citizen and an atheist can never be considered a patriot. Because this is one nation under God. And he got elected president. Twice. And then his son. Twice.
So please climb off that horse and shut up about the Muslims. Humanists and an atheists can say something about Muslims. Christians and Jews are just part of the same mob, however.
Come on now! You can easily feel whether they are man-made or not, and if that fails you can still ascertain it by looking at the degree to which they wiggle (or not) during a shag.
Besides... who cares, really? If it pleases you it pleases you.
I'll have you know that I've bought and eaten some of the most splendid ham, pork chops and ribs I have tasted to date in Israel. The Wadi in Haifa has a lot of Christian Arabs that sell outrageously good meat, including pork. Alright, I do have a spot of trouble sourcing real raw bacon, because the climate here causes butchers to only sell the stuff smoked or cured, but that's besides the point.
Furthermore the national supermarket chain "Tiv Tam" (for Russians by Russians) has pork, albeit of inferior quality and freshness to the Wadi. The benefit of that supermarket is though that they also sell Dutch cheeses, excellent pickled herring, belgian waffles, stroopwafels and in some branches even my brand of garlic sauce and liquorice.
The hell we do. Philosophers have been arguing the point for ages, but at the end of the day I do believe there are such things as absolute morals. I do not believe such morals should arise from such arbitrary things as the haphazard religious writings that float around this planet, but rather should be based on common sense and deliberate thought.
A society which thinks it's perfectly OK to rape anyone in sight and then eats them blatantly violates everything that was ever said about human rights pretty much anywhere in this world. There is probably not a government on the planet right now that would get behind that notion, even though opinions on homosexuality, the death penalty, adultery, and women's rights are still highly debated amongst nations.
Hence, I cannot disagree more with you. Such a society *should* be changed. This by no means I condone what the United States are doing in Iraq at this moment, because I suspect that the US' brand of "help" has cost well over half a million Iraqi's their lives for a conflict in which the US helped put the ousted regime in charge in the first place.
conflict is an essential part of evolution
If you study natural selection long enough, you would realize that Survival and Reproduction are essential to evolution. Obviously, if you win all conflicts by means of violence, you will evolve to the point where your race will be violent, physically strong and psychologically aggressive.
In today's society, however, mere physical survival has become commonplace and evolution of humans will likely have more to do with our minds than with our raw capacity for killing the other bloke. Hence I would argue that the prerequisites for further human evolution have evolved beyond conflict or rather the violent resolution thereof.
Those who think otherwise will normally fight for their way
In a parliamentary democracy which is governed by consensus such as The Netherlands and to a large extent the European Union, we tend to guarantee each individual's rights to his thoughts and his free speech. Within the boundaries of a body of law that does exclude killing and raping anyone in sight, of course.
If there are particular items on which you disagree, you are free to do so. You are furthermore free to start a political party (yes, you *can* have more than two of those), and you are free to try and get a seat in parliament, your municipality or your city council or even the government to see if you can swing popular opinion to the degree where your view becomes policy.
I feel that many of the laws we have in The Netherlands are perfectly reasonable, and I feel that as a citizen I ultimately have the power to debate/change the ones that don't. Whether I choose to do so or not is a question of commitment versus the degree to which the less reasonable laws affect me. You could say it's a matter of Return on Investment.
If other parties that live in The Netherlands would start fighting over those bits, I would argue they are being either very primitive about things or they have fringe views which they know will never see the light of day in legislation anyway. Instead of doing the decent thing and simply moving to a society that adheres to their views, these uncivilized individuals would then resort to violence to get their way at the expense of the will of the majority of citizens.
In other words: You're full of shit. It is completely beyond me, from a scientific, logical, political and moral perspective, how your post could have been modded +4 insightful.
I can stop when I want to, would turn into "Ik kan ophouden wanneer ik wil" but more likely would be "als ik wou kon ik stoppen" given the context.
Similarly, in German it would turn into "Ich kann aufhören wenn ich will / wünsche" but infinitely more elegant would be "Ich könnte aufhören wenn ich die Wille dazu hätte" or "Ich könnte aufhören wenn ich möchte", where "wenn" also could be stressed more by using "wann" or "wann immer".
Now in Swedish I would say "Jag kan sluta när jag vill" but again, given the context I would probably think "Om jag hade viljan skulle jag kunna sluta när som helst" is much more elegant.
To cut a long story short: I would argue this is a Babelfish entry. But a damn funny one.
Listen, if you invent butter you can patent that. If you happen to spread it on a sandwich clockwise with a broad wooden butter knife, I don't think you should be able to patent that. I will forever be against "process" patents, because they're just plain silly. Hence, if McD wants to patent the "DEVICE FOR SANDWICH PREPARATION", fair enough, but a flow chart detailing the various things you do when you prepare a sandwich? Never.
The fact that you earn a living working for a patent office or law firm that specializes in IP doesn't convince me of the validity of your arguments, and neither does that paper of that partner at that firm of yours. The only thing that is written on Method/Process Patents in that paper is this:
Business method patents protect methods of doing practically anything.114 - How to (1) run Priceline.com's reverse auction,115 sell magazine subscriptions,116 get customers to "round up" purchases to the nearest dollar.
Apart from that the paper you mention is a how-to of sorts, it does not delve into the ethical/philosophical discussion on whether patents / copyrights / trademarks actually motivate or protect "ye learned men" when they "write ye learned books" as Jefferson put it.
So basically your arguments against the original poster's arguments are horribly coloured by the fact that you earn your livelihood in that business, and instead of honestly discussing the philosophical merits of your views, you distract by pointing at a dumbed down "how-to" written by your boss.
That's jolly bad form, old chap. Jolly bad form indeed!
And Wikipedia is always right? Heh. I tend to agree with the previous poster. And what's more, I'm relatively sure Miles Davis would, as would Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Improvisation does support jazz, specifically in live settings. But Jazz definitely is *not* improv. Ask Donald Fagen what he thinks of Improvisation. Hell, it's a slightly different genre, but ask Prince and James Brown what they think of it while you're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Internationally speaking it makes the USA look like a staggeringly stupid collection of induhviduals.
The "right" to bear arms already does, but this is deliciously silly. If I didn't know better it could have been conceived by the Monty Python gang.
Hehehehe.... That rebuttal was a classic! Instant Classic, I tell ya.
If I had the mod points I'd say Mod that up +5 Funny / Informative, +5 Best-Bitch-Slap-Ever and give Samus a Hot-dog and a hummer.
Seriously.
Delicious.
Anyone that is going on about the possibility or probability of particular kinds of tech existing or co-existing has not understood the point of Science Fiction. Period.
The End of Eternity (Asimov) is basically a book about human character. We go extinct because we're too sheltered and without struggle we can't live. The Star Trek series always talked about socio-political issues, like in the episode about the culture that had mandatory Euthanasia at ~60. Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) is about censorship. Censorship is bad, m'kay? And likewise all good science fiction really talks about philosophical topics like morals, culture, identity, life and the universe.
Having said that, BSG is a series which deals with human character. The drive for self-realization vs survival of the flock/species is quite central in it all, along with various other psychological traits we have. The first season of BSG was excellent and it being excellent had nothing to do with "cool stuff blowing up in space". Dune wasn't about ornithopters either. It was about politics and religion, if it's even possible to separate the two.
Then again, so did the "Virgin" Mary. The original texts in Hebrew about the circumstances of Jesus' birth described Mary as a "young woman" which got mis-translated into Greek with the word "Virgin". After ~380 years of debate, the RC Church finally decided (I don't recall where the papal edict was issued) on Jesus' divinity and the existence of the Holy Trinity.
Therefore, if Jesus actually existed it is more than likely that Mary got fucked. Proper fucked? Yes, proper fucked.
As for the rest of us? We got screwed too. Not just by whatever sex-partners we've had, but predominantly by the RC Church and whatever offspring it had.
Actually it's the Berliner Motor Werkstadt, which used to be an airplane engine factory, hence the rotor-blade design of the logo. While I agree some BMW drivers are indeed tossers, I don't see a causal link between tosser-dom and BMW-driving.
I live in Israel where everyone in a motorized vehicle seems to be a braindead wanker if driving style is indicative. And they do just fine in Mazda 3's, Hyundai Getz's and other small, beat-up cars.
You cannot blame the company for its clientele's behaviour in a subset of the geographies they sell to. Now abbreviations like FIAT meaning "Fix It Again, Tony!" are funny, because they actually talk about the properties of, say, my FIAT Tipo in the nineties.
Sure. So most German car manufacturers like Audi, VW, BMW and Mercedes will give you 10+ years of warranty on the chassis of the car because they all know that their cars will turn to rust in 5 or 6 years?
Now the body work, that's interesting... Most European cars nowadays will have more plastic for body work than anything else, if you look at Renault for instance, it's pure plastic. This is done to protect the driver and fellow road users on impact. The car will simply shred.
As an added bonus, since it's Not Metal (TM), it don't rust. BMW is currently investigating the use of cloth, enforced with carbon, which can shape-shift for their bodies, so I'm really wondering what the hell you're basing your claims on.
Now I'm not going to diss on KIA. I've been driving a Hyundai i30 to great satisfaction for a while, and lord knows Toyota's never ever break, so I have no beef with Asian cars. I do however observe that KIA and Mazda are behind on their materials. Toyota and Honda aren't, or less so, but KIA, Hyundai and Mazda feel a lot more "Tin-Can-ish" than their modern European counterparts.
IANACE though. I am not a car expert though. But then I don't make categorical statements without any back up. :-D
mature, arrogant and angry-looking
I don't see how those three are masculine traits. Obviously the authors never picked a fight with my woman.
I'm running a completely updated XP box at home and I have no issues.
Neither with games, nor photoshop 7 (! Ancient), nor office documents, nor Firefox, nor file management, nor with Tag & Rename and all that.
As I've been indicating, this forum is not the best place to get an objective opinion on what Microsoft does or doesn't do.
Right. My employer is rolling out Vista by the bucket load, and the colleagues I've heard about this say:
- Looks great
- Some networking bits hard to find / through wizards / bleh
- Networking does work great except for the explorer flaw thingy
- Hibernate / sleep work very well, and very reliably
- Performs great (mind you, I'm typing this on a relatively new 6910p notebook)
So you have seen *one* Vista laptop. The brand/model of which you're not disclosing. And you don't mention if it's Vista or SP1, or what you did to it. If I were you I would think again, because in my organization there are thousands of Vista laptops, and I have yet to hear a complaint about the hibernate/sleep functions.
Again, I'm not a microsoft fanboi. I would like to run Linux but it's too much bloody tinkering to get it to do what I want. I don't like package management, thinking about dependencies, tweaking things for years and generally scrolling through text files to configure certain things. Those are things I do for work, not when I'm trying to watch a house episode, look at pictures or surf the net. Linux, at present, is a great server OS.
Although frankly I would not like to run Mac OS/X because of the interface, I will get a Mac Mini as a DVD player / entertainment system linked to my LCD TV and receiver. That cute little remote really does it for me. It's great, small, silent and sexy. What can one say?
Having said that, I still want Vista / XP or whatever windows they throw at me next on my desktop. Because it does what I want it to, and since XP it does it really well, actually. My 6910p laptop with the extra horse-shoe battery just plain rocks. It's not the smallest of laptops, but I can work for 5.5 or 6 hours without juice and it does things well with some decent screen real-estate and a nice-sized keyboard.
Now I double-dare anyone to come and tell me I'm a brainless consumer. Really. I'm simply an IT professional that wants a hammer when he's driving nails, a screwdriver when he's screwing screws and a drill when he's making holes.
If XP is end of life and Windows 7 is supported, it's already better right there. Sorry to say this mate, but I have a vague feeling Windows 7 will be better regardless.
Currently I'm running Vista on my corporate desktop, and I'm not unhappy about it. The only gripe I have with the platform is that network discovery is done every time you open Windows explorer.
If I hibernate / sleep while on the corporate network, and I wake up that thing at home, opening an explorer window will take ~20 seconds because it tries to access the previously mapped network drives. This should be done out of band or potentially not at all in my view, not *every* bloody time you open an explorer. It's a bad implementation.
Apart from that the GUI is nice, the Networking menus are a pain in the backside, and XP's control panel was better. However, it manages sleep / hibernation more nicely and runs very (dare I say it) stable with the software suite I need.
To cut a long story short, I've been with Windows since 1.0x and I can tell you that in general the quality of the OS has been going up steadily. Vista is not perfect, but it's a *lot* nicer than NT4, 2000 for the desktop, 98, 95. Whether it's better than XP is somewhat debatable, but in the end it's a tight race. All in all, the trend is upwards.
Now Windows 7 or whatever the new iteration for the Desktop will be, will likely be better than XP indeed. Anyone who claims different probably hasn't paid attention to MicroSoft's history.
The thing is that this site is a Linux-centric religious institute, so obviously you'll easily and frequently hear "Upgrade myth busted", "Linux to dominate world in 2009" and "w00t!". The truth is that MicroSoft isn't all bad, and neither is Linux, but at the end of the day I do believe people will skip Vista to some degree (ME anyone?) only to hop on board at the next iteration again.
Which is not necessarily bad for the market or the consumers.
I think that the credit crisis as sparked by the US sub-prime mortgage fiasco has amply illustrated what happens when you actually trust "The Market" and let it fly without regulating it. If you do not put up rules, people will tend to get screwed to a much larger degree. So you can stick your anarcho-capitalism where the sun don't shine as far as I'm concerned.
The fact that you say education is not a right is somewhat revolting for me, and that's for purely selfish reasons, as a matter of fact. Let's say I live in The Netherlands, which is a parliamentary consensus democracy. Now I'd like us to think about the concept of not considering education a right, and therefore taking it away, and making it available only to those that can pay for it. All of a sudden, the electorate of the country (and remember, it's a consensus democracy) turns into an unruly, uneducated, overly religious, burger-flipping, channel hopping, overweight, consumerist mob.... oh..... wait.... we already have that.... it's called the USA.
Reminds me of a Cake song with the line:
You passed the test
just like all the rest
but never really understood
the reasons why you took it
in the first place
ah yeah
Hey, if it's good enough for Joseph, it's good enough for Wu12.
Obviously, your statement was nuanced differently than mine. When I said survival and reproduction are essential, to me that means the ability to survive long enough to reproduce one's gene-set as well as facilitating the survival of your offspring so they can pass on that set of genes.
Secondly, when I said physical survival is commonplace, I meant that mere physical strength or a capacity towards violence will not necessarily make you more or less successful at reproducing in today's society, which changes the ballgame quite a bit.
And lastly, I don't see why you say "if we were to" in that sentence. We already reproduce with the same enthusiasm that we kill others with. If we are to stand a chance of surviving as a species, we either need to branch out into space or we need to find a way to curb our reproduction. It's either that or drastically increasing the killing bit.
Having said that, we are now self-aware and we are aware of quite a few of the principles that drive evolution, so you could argue that we are starting to get into the position where we can engineer our evolution, for better or worse.
First of all, plenty of Christians have killed and will kill a non-believer. It's documented well, and countless times.
Funnily enough 10% of Jews in Israel *will* also stone your ass if you drive through a particular street on a Shabat, if you happen be Palestinian and live near certain settlers and if you dare to drive/eat/smoke in their vicinity on a Yom Kippur.
Believe me. I live here. The latter example actually took place in Akko recently. An Arab drove through Akko (which is an Arabic city), ended up on a Jewish street, got stones thrown at his car and subsequently *he* was arrested for it.
Then there are the boys who immigrate from Russia who get bullied into circumcising themselves at the age of 20 by their peers in the Army. That one's about brainwashing *and* self-mutilation as a consequence of it, and that's still done by the more secular Jews, that's not even the work of your 10% of orthodox fringe idiots.
Now my boy would be considered Jewish because his mother is an Israeli Jewess, so don't come to me and cry anti-semitism for what I've just pointed out either, please.
Having said that, I think the Christians should be very, very quiet about the Muslims killing those who are not Muslim because we all know what religion brought on the Spanish Inquisition, which hunts, the 100 year war, the Crusades and many other calamities that were aimed towards non-believers.
In 1987 George Bush Sr said an atheist can never be considered a citizen and an atheist can never be considered a patriot. Because this is one nation under God. And he got elected president. Twice. And then his son. Twice.
So please climb off that horse and shut up about the Muslims. Humanists and an atheists can say something about Muslims. Christians and Jews are just part of the same mob, however.
Come on now! You can easily feel whether they are man-made or not, and if that fails you can still ascertain it by looking at the degree to which they wiggle (or not) during a shag.
Besides... who cares, really? If it pleases you it pleases you.
I'll have you know that I've bought and eaten some of the most splendid ham, pork chops and ribs I have tasted to date in Israel. The Wadi in Haifa has a lot of Christian Arabs that sell outrageously good meat, including pork. Alright, I do have a spot of trouble sourcing real raw bacon, because the climate here causes butchers to only sell the stuff smoked or cured, but that's besides the point.
Furthermore the national supermarket chain "Tiv Tam" (for Russians by Russians) has pork, albeit of inferior quality and freshness to the Wadi. The benefit of that supermarket is though that they also sell Dutch cheeses, excellent pickled herring, belgian waffles, stroopwafels and in some branches even my brand of garlic sauce and liquorice.
we have no right so tell them what to do
The hell we do. Philosophers have been arguing the point for ages, but at the end of the day I do believe there are such things as absolute morals. I do not believe such morals should arise from such arbitrary things as the haphazard religious writings that float around this planet, but rather should be based on common sense and deliberate thought.
A society which thinks it's perfectly OK to rape anyone in sight and then eats them blatantly violates everything that was ever said about human rights pretty much anywhere in this world. There is probably not a government on the planet right now that would get behind that notion, even though opinions on homosexuality, the death penalty, adultery, and women's rights are still highly debated amongst nations.
Hence, I cannot disagree more with you. Such a society *should* be changed. This by no means I condone what the United States are doing in Iraq at this moment, because I suspect that the US' brand of "help" has cost well over half a million Iraqi's their lives for a conflict in which the US helped put the ousted regime in charge in the first place.
conflict is an essential part of evolution
If you study natural selection long enough, you would realize that Survival and Reproduction are essential to evolution. Obviously, if you win all conflicts by means of violence, you will evolve to the point where your race will be violent, physically strong and psychologically aggressive.
In today's society, however, mere physical survival has become commonplace and evolution of humans will likely have more to do with our minds than with our raw capacity for killing the other bloke. Hence I would argue that the prerequisites for further human evolution have evolved beyond conflict or rather the violent resolution thereof.
Those who think otherwise will normally fight for their way
In a parliamentary democracy which is governed by consensus such as The Netherlands and to a large extent the European Union, we tend to guarantee each individual's rights to his thoughts and his free speech. Within the boundaries of a body of law that does exclude killing and raping anyone in sight, of course.
If there are particular items on which you disagree, you are free to do so. You are furthermore free to start a political party (yes, you *can* have more than two of those), and you are free to try and get a seat in parliament, your municipality or your city council or even the government to see if you can swing popular opinion to the degree where your view becomes policy.
I feel that many of the laws we have in The Netherlands are perfectly reasonable, and I feel that as a citizen I ultimately have the power to debate/change the ones that don't. Whether I choose to do so or not is a question of commitment versus the degree to which the less reasonable laws affect me. You could say it's a matter of Return on Investment.
If other parties that live in The Netherlands would start fighting over those bits, I would argue they are being either very primitive about things or they have fringe views which they know will never see the light of day in legislation anyway. Instead of doing the decent thing and simply moving to a society that adheres to their views, these uncivilized individuals would then resort to violence to get their way at the expense of the will of the majority of citizens.
In other words: You're full of shit. It is completely beyond me, from a scientific, logical, political and moral perspective, how your post could have been modded +4 insightful.
Get cable.
The French had to invent diplomacy due to the quality of their armed forces.
After all, the 4 DEFCON Levels in France are:
4 - Hide
3 - Run
2 - Surrender
1 - Collaborate
Somebody ought to mod parent up. Insightful.
Incorrect.
I can stop when I want to, would turn into "Ik kan ophouden wanneer ik wil" but more likely would be "als ik wou kon ik stoppen" given the context.
Similarly, in German it would turn into "Ich kann aufhören wenn ich will / wünsche" but infinitely more elegant would be "Ich könnte aufhören wenn ich die Wille dazu hätte" or "Ich könnte aufhören wenn ich möchte", where "wenn" also could be stressed more by using "wann" or "wann immer".
Now in Swedish I would say "Jag kan sluta när jag vill" but again, given the context I would probably think "Om jag hade viljan skulle jag kunna sluta när som helst" is much more elegant.
To cut a long story short: I would argue this is a Babelfish entry. But a damn funny one.
Listen, if you invent butter you can patent that. If you happen to spread it on a sandwich clockwise with a broad wooden butter knife, I don't think you should be able to patent that. I will forever be against "process" patents, because they're just plain silly. Hence, if McD wants to patent the "DEVICE FOR SANDWICH PREPARATION", fair enough, but a flow chart detailing the various things you do when you prepare a sandwich? Never.
The fact that you earn a living working for a patent office or law firm that specializes in IP doesn't convince me of the validity of your arguments, and neither does that paper of that partner at that firm of yours. The only thing that is written on Method/Process Patents in that paper is this:
Business method patents protect methods of doing practically
anything.114 - How to (1) run Priceline.com's reverse auction,115 sell magazine subscriptions,116
get customers to "round up" purchases to the nearest dollar.
Apart from that the paper you mention is a how-to of sorts, it does not delve into the ethical/philosophical discussion on whether patents / copyrights / trademarks actually motivate or protect "ye learned men" when they "write ye learned books" as Jefferson put it.
So basically your arguments against the original poster's arguments are horribly coloured by the fact that you earn your livelihood in that business, and instead of honestly discussing the philosophical merits of your views, you distract by pointing at a dumbed down "how-to" written by your boss.
That's jolly bad form, old chap. Jolly bad form indeed!
Never had that with Oasis. I got it the first time around, so I didn't buy the album.
But then I'm a Blur fan.
And Wikipedia is always right? Heh. I tend to agree with the previous poster. And what's more, I'm relatively sure Miles Davis would, as would Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Improvisation does support jazz, specifically in live settings. But Jazz definitely is *not* improv. Ask Donald Fagen what he thinks of Improvisation. Hell, it's a slightly different genre, but ask Prince and James Brown what they think of it while you're at it.