Galileo (sp?) knew that the moon was not a perfect sphere. He turned his telescope upon it and saw mountains. At the time the Roman Catholic Church maintained that Luna was a perfect sphere, and was willing to kill people who disagreed. Galileo (sp?), being quite the smart-ass, reconciled these apparently contradictory statements by saying that there was an invisible-but-perfect sphere which surrounded the moon and its mountains. Anyway, that's what an old astronomy teacher once told me.
Of course, all this happened long before Terran astronauts landed there.
...as soon as someone comes up with a plan for a nation that actually has some significance in the Real World (tm). My physical body has to live somewhere, and unless the new nation establishes itself on an asteroid, a floating island, Antarctica, or some other unoccupied territory, my body will have to live within a territory that is occupied by some traditional nation. This means that my body will be subject to the various tyrannical actions of this nation. If Cybertopia (or whatever) says that I am free to do as I please as long as I don't harm others, will this nation help me protect this essential liberty when stormtroopers representing the United States (or whatever government) bash down my door, sieze my property, and send me to a prison camp because I happen to be smoking a joint? Doubtful.
What we (i.e. geeks or some other group) need to do is either leave our various occupied lands for greener pastures, or else have a revolution.
Seeing a restricted movie constituted a violation of another person's right of life, liberty, and property;
The restriction of the movie were not based upon the seemingly arbitrary age of 17 and the whim of a bunch of known idiots such as those found in the MPAA;
You could somehow convince me that there is something magical about "laws" and "policies" that makes it "bad" to violate them regardless of how idiotic they are.
So in other words I consider your point invalid. Of course, this is to be expected as I am the sort of person who thinks that it is the civic duty of all citizens to violate an unjust law or policy, while my guess is that you are the sort of person who thinks every law and policy should be obeyed no matter how onerous. I shall spare you the typical reference to Nazi Germany as an example of bad law.
I'll conclude with a sound bite. The only valid laws and policies are those which protect the life, liberty, and property of the people. All others deserve to be violated.
While I have nothing against Tux or penguins in general, I once borrowed someone's Slackware CD set (3.0 I think), and it had a really cool platypus where the penguin is nowadays, and I must say that I like the platypus a lot better.
antizeus: 27 hits, and it displayed only the first 20.
notopia: 17 hits, and it displayed only the first 10.
"evil farmer": 33 hits, and it displayed only the first 20.
One would think that they'd get this sort of detail worked out early on in the development process. Despite that problem, I was impressed by the thoroughness. There was some stuff there that I'd never see on other search engines.
(by the way, "Notopia" was the name of a great radio program on KCSB that disappeared several years ago, and Evil Farmer was a great band in the Santa Barbara Calif area which also disappeared several years ago. I miss both of them. Unfortunately, antizeus is still with us.)
I can't see Socrates coming up with The Republic. I think it was all Plato, who used Socrates as a mouthpiece. Then again my perception may be skewed because I think Plato is an idiot, and I don't like The Republic either.
To balance your dogmatic assertion that "IT WAS WRONG" I will assert that IT WAS RIGHT. You seem to have the belief which is common among (though not restricted to) christians that your particular moral code should be applied to all intelligent life in the universe. However, and this may come as a surprise to you, not everyone shares the belief that certain arbitrarily chosen words and subjects are bad/harmful. I for one consider the whole idea of "profanity" to be meaningless. Whenever I ask people who oppose "profanity" why it is "bad", I invariably get answers such as: "It's bad because it's bad" or "It's bad because I was raised to believe that it's bad" or, more often, I get flamed for asking. As for your problem with Katz's lying, let me indulge in a reference to Nazi Germany (no debate would be complete without one): If someone was hiding Jews from the Nazis, would you consider it wrong for them to lie about it? Or would you have them say "Sure, I've seen some Jews, I have some hidden in the basement."? While the theatre situation wasn't as nasty as the Nazi treatment of Jews, this example can serve to illustrate that lying is not necessarily a bad thing. Here's a question: If a lot of people decided that kids shouldn't go to church without having a parent along the whole time, would you consider it bad for someone to lie and get kids into church without their parents? If the answer is "yes" than I salute your consistency, but not much else.
I've always wanted to cruise the asteroid belt, live on the moon, etc. Unfortunately, with the rate at which things are developing, I had better hope that the immortality pill becomes available first. It seems like that investment in space is being done mostly by governments, but governments have to spend a lot of their money and effort in critical areas such as maintaining vast databases on their subjects and buying $400 toilet seats, plus there are a bunch of people in government who don't like space travel anyway, so I wonder if we shouldn't use some other means to get off the home world. Since it costs a lot of money, big business might be able to do it, but then again big business is pretty evil. So I wonder if it's feasible for millions of geeks to get together, pool their stock options and considerable talents, and do the damn thing them/ourselves. Could there possibly be a large yet decentralized space program? I'm sure it would have to be decentralized given the tendency towards anarchism in Geekdom.
I think the clause "without avoiding technical discussions when necessary" could use some clarification. For example, is the word "necessary" descriptive of "avoiding" or "discussions"?
The South Park movie is designed to offend people. To push buttons. To slaughter sacred cows. As such, we can use the movie to see what our sacred cows are, where our buttons are, and how we might be offended. With this knowledge, we are less likely to be distracted by unproductive emotions which may follow from offense. A condemnation of this movie is in some sense a vote for emotional weakness.
Re:Religious bigotry: alive and well in the USA.
on
Spoonful of Quickies
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· Score: 1
Sometimes I wonder what the intended audience of the Jon Katz pieces is. This one, and some (most?) others, seem as if they are directed towards some other less technical forum. Does he submit his articles to other places? Does he use slashdot as an editorial mechanism before submitting his articles to other places? I also wonder if he always makes parallels to popular media in his commentaries (e.g. Star Wars, Buffy). "The various Linux distros, like the characters on Gilligan's Island, all have their own individual characteristics."
Hell yeah. I work for a company whose main purpose is to develop innovative and valuable (and also non-free) software, and it treats the filing of patents as a defensive tactic, to help ward off lawsuits. Of course, the lawyers who file our patents get a lot of money for this. Funny how lawyers benefit on all sides of this situation. Surely a coincidence.
Hey, that's no problem. Any conspiracy theory can be reinflated with suitable embellishments. I can modify this particular conspiracy theory, for example, to include local insurrections in Africa that are provoked by entities which compete with the existing colonial powers in Africa.
This project is a prelude to an invasion and re-colonization of Africa by the industrialized Western powers. They will finance this project, and will subsequently land troops in coastal countries under the pretext of protecting vital net links in what they call "unstable" areas. Each interested power will set up spheres of influence aka protectorates based around their invasion zones.
It's good to see a first post with relevant content. Yeah. CNN probably said that it had the same "modus operandi" (quite the well-defined term, eh?) because it spread through e-mail. I wonder if recent increase in news exposure about these trojan horses and other tactic will have the effect of better educating the general public about basic computer security principles...?
I seethe with cold fury (ok, not really) when I see that a site depends on JavaScript when it doesn't need to. Basic navigation functions should not be done with JavaScript! Anything that CAN be done with HTML/CGI SHOULD be donw with HTML/CGI. Unnecessary use of JavaScript means that people using Lynx get screwed. Sure, I could load some bloatware like Netscape and turn JavaScript on, and hope it doesn't crash when I go visit that one site (assuming I care enough to go that far, which I usually don't), but I still maintain that if something can be done in a Lynx-friendly manner, then it should be.
"This is a must read both for those who care about our future on one hand, and for those who think that there might be something in mysticism on the other hand."
Were you implying that those who think that there may be something to mysticism do not care about our future?
Another question I have is: what do we do with questions that don't seem to have any answer attainable by scientific methods? Is there really any harm in just making stuff up?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, all this happened long before Terran astronauts landed there.
Unfortunately that guy is Homer Simpson.
What we (i.e. geeks or some other group) need to do is either leave our various occupied lands for greener pastures, or else have a revolution.
Oh, by the way, I still get logged out on Taco Hell.
- Seeing a restricted movie constituted a violation of another person's right of life, liberty, and property;
- The restriction of the movie were not based upon the seemingly arbitrary age of 17 and the whim of a bunch of known idiots such as those found in the MPAA;
- You could somehow convince me that there is something magical about "laws" and "policies" that makes it "bad" to violate them regardless of how idiotic they are.
So in other words I consider your point invalid. Of course, this is to be expected as I am the sort of person who thinks that it is the civic duty of all citizens to violate an unjust law or policy, while my guess is that you are the sort of person who thinks every law and policy should be obeyed no matter how onerous. I shall spare you the typical reference to Nazi Germany as an example of bad law.I'll conclude with a sound bite. The only valid laws and policies are those which protect the life, liberty, and property of the people. All others deserve to be violated.
While I have nothing against Tux or penguins in general, I once borrowed someone's Slackware CD set (3.0 I think), and it had a really cool platypus where the penguin is nowadays, and I must say that I like the platypus a lot better.
Last I checked, Europe was not part of the western hemisphere, though I suppose continental drift might have changed that since then.
- antizeus: 27 hits, and it displayed only the first 20.
- notopia: 17 hits, and it displayed only the first 10.
- "evil farmer": 33 hits, and it displayed only the first 20.
One would think that they'd get this sort of detail worked out early on in the development process. Despite that problem, I was impressed by the thoroughness. There was some stuff there that I'd never see on other search engines.(by the way, "Notopia" was the name of a great radio program on KCSB that disappeared several years ago, and Evil Farmer was a great band in the Santa Barbara Calif area which also disappeared several years ago. I miss both of them. Unfortunately, antizeus is still with us.)
I can't see Socrates coming up with The Republic. I think it was all Plato, who used Socrates as a mouthpiece. Then again my perception may be skewed because I think Plato is an idiot, and I don't like The Republic either.
To balance your dogmatic assertion that "IT WAS WRONG" I will assert that IT WAS RIGHT. You seem to have the belief which is common among (though not restricted to) christians that your particular moral code should be applied to all intelligent life in the universe. However, and this may come as a surprise to you, not everyone shares the belief that certain arbitrarily chosen words and subjects are bad/harmful. I for one consider the whole idea of "profanity" to be meaningless. Whenever I ask people who oppose "profanity" why it is "bad", I invariably get answers such as: "It's bad because it's bad" or "It's bad because I was raised to believe that it's bad" or, more often, I get flamed for asking. As for your problem with Katz's lying, let me indulge in a reference to Nazi Germany (no debate would be complete without one): If someone was hiding Jews from the Nazis, would you consider it wrong for them to lie about it? Or would you have them say "Sure, I've seen some Jews, I have some hidden in the basement."? While the theatre situation wasn't as nasty as the Nazi treatment of Jews, this example can serve to illustrate that lying is not necessarily a bad thing. Here's a question: If a lot of people decided that kids shouldn't go to church without having a parent along the whole time, would you consider it bad for someone to lie and get kids into church without their parents? If the answer is "yes" than I salute your consistency, but not much else.
I've always wanted to cruise the asteroid belt, live on the moon, etc. Unfortunately, with the rate at which things are developing, I had better hope that the immortality pill becomes available first. It seems like that investment in space is being done mostly by governments, but governments have to spend a lot of their money and effort in critical areas such as maintaining vast databases on their subjects and buying $400 toilet seats, plus there are a bunch of people in government who don't like space travel anyway, so I wonder if we shouldn't use some other means to get off the home world. Since it costs a lot of money, big business might be able to do it, but then again big business is pretty evil. So I wonder if it's feasible for millions of geeks to get together, pool their stock options and considerable talents, and do the damn thing them/ourselves. Could there possibly be a large yet decentralized space program? I'm sure it would have to be decentralized given the tendency towards anarchism in Geekdom.
I think the clause "without avoiding technical discussions when necessary" could use some clarification. For example, is the word "necessary" descriptive of "avoiding" or "discussions"?
The South Park movie is designed to offend people. To push buttons. To slaughter sacred cows. As such, we can use the movie to see what our sacred cows are, where our buttons are, and how we might be offended. With this knowledge, we are less likely to be distracted by unproductive emotions which may follow from offense. A condemnation of this movie is in some sense a vote for emotional weakness.
You may not have a sense of humor.
You know, we wouldn't need to use translating programs or human translators if everyone would just learn, and publish everything in, Esperanto.
Sometimes I wonder what the intended audience of the Jon Katz pieces is. This one, and some (most?) others, seem as if they are directed towards some other less technical forum. Does he submit his articles to other places? Does he use slashdot as an editorial mechanism before submitting his articles to other places? I also wonder if he always makes parallels to popular media in his commentaries (e.g. Star Wars, Buffy). "The various Linux distros, like the characters on Gilligan's Island, all have their own individual characteristics."
Hell yeah. I work for a company whose main purpose is to develop innovative and valuable (and also non-free) software, and it treats the filing of patents as a defensive tactic, to help ward off lawsuits. Of course, the lawyers who file our patents get a lot of money for this. Funny how lawyers benefit on all sides of this situation. Surely a coincidence.
Don't let your kids leave the house if you don't want them exposed to anything outside your control.
Real Hackers search by randomly typing in URLs until they find what they're looking for.
Hey, that's no problem. Any conspiracy theory can be reinflated with suitable embellishments. I can modify this particular conspiracy theory, for example, to include local insurrections in Africa that are provoked by entities which compete with the existing colonial powers in Africa.
This project is a prelude to an invasion and re-colonization of Africa by the industrialized Western powers. They will finance this project, and will subsequently land troops in coastal countries under the pretext of protecting vital net links in what they call "unstable" areas. Each interested power will set up spheres of influence aka protectorates based around their invasion zones.
It didn't even have a working submit button.
It's good to see a first post with relevant content. Yeah. CNN probably said that it had the same "modus operandi" (quite the well-defined term, eh?) because it spread through e-mail. I wonder if recent increase in news exposure about these trojan horses and other tactic will have the effect of better educating the general public about basic computer security principles...?
grrr...
"This is a must read both for those who care about our future on one hand, and for those who think that there might be something in mysticism on the other hand."
Were you implying that those who think that there may be something to mysticism do not care about our future?
Another question I have is: what do we do with questions that don't seem to have any answer attainable by scientific methods? Is there really any harm in just making stuff up?