What sort of application are you writing where any of the differences are significant?
It's a Unix-oid platform. If you're writing user apps you should be able to write your software so as to be able to compile and run on GNU/Linux, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, or whatever, with only a few #ifdefs.
but no freedom is absolute, when you trample on someone elses freedom (I dont know by raping their kids) you cant hide behind another freedom.
The issue is not sex with children, the issue is speech about sex with children. NAMBLA can believe that sex with children is ok; they can say that sex with children is ok; they can work for changes to the law; they're even allowed to talk about how to (in general) get children to want to have sex with adults. (Yes, personally it gives me the creeps to think about, but it also gives me the creeps to think about people watching televangelists.)
Putting spikes in trees which can kill a human being if hit with a saw blade is terror.
Destroying the ecological systems on which we all depend is terrorism.
Publicized tree-spiking may be considered "destruction of property", since it renders the trees unsuitable for logging (though how a tree ever gets to be considered "property" in the first place is problematic), but it's not terrorism. If someone knowingly goes into a forest that has thus been rendered unsuitable for logging, tries to cut down a tree and gets killed...think of it as evolution in action.
And if you give money to the ELF to mop their floors that frees up floor moping money they already had to go destroy someone elses property.
We're talking about legal fees. Legal fees go to defend the accused. You know, those guys we're supposed to presume are innocent until they're proven guilty?
Only if you consider an outcome whereby corporate wrongdoers can operate without fear a positive outcome...
This is almost why "loser pays" is a horrible idea. Amalgamated Profits, Inc. is poisioning your town? Under loser pays, if you try to sue and their high priced lawyers beat the ones you managed to scrape enough pennies together to hire, not only are you poisoned and broke from your own legal fees, you've got to pay Amalgamated Profits, Inc.'s fees. So you don't dare sue.
Of course, id prefer google to keep up a kickass search engine, not waste its money arguing against idiots like this
that represent themselves so they can sue for free
If they don't stand up to fuckheads like this, they can't keep up a kickass search engine, because they'll have to filter everything that some fuckhead might sue over.
However, engineering solutions should not be wholly discounted.
As a temporary stopgap as we move to sustainable energy, perhaps they may be of use. They're certainly interesting to think about.
However, until we have a much deeper understanding of ecology I'd have to say it's much wiser to give priority to stopping our f*cking around with the spaceship's life support system and letting it reset itself, than to f*cking with it some more in hopes of balancing out our first f*ckups.
However, interest in organic farming has increased greatly recently, and organic farming uses much more land per pound of food grown than conventional high-yield farming.
The difference is not that great, perhaps on the order of 10 percent. (Some say that there's no significant difference at all. There are others who claim that organic methods have very low yields, but I think agriculture research sponsored by Dow and Monsanto has about the same credibility as lung cancer research sponsored by Phillip Morris.) Considering that most organic farmers are new to the methods involved, we can expect yields to rise as experience is gained.
Also, if you want to talk land use you need to factor in the land used for energy production, the land taken up by chemical plants, the land used up by drilling and mining operations, the land used for waste disposal of all of these operations, and the land eventually rendered unsuitable for agriculture by non-sustainable methods.
That's not even factoring in water pollution from fertilizer and pesticide production and runoff, air pollution from chemical production and energy production. And not even touching on the health costs of pesticide contamination in the finished food product.
Considering the total resource footprint, organic is the clear winner.
And there's little "conventional" about chemical-saturated high-yield farming - it represents a very small slice of humanity's experience with agriculture.
The secondary (and tertiary, etc.) effects of plans such as the Kyoto Protocol are myriad and difficult to predict (or even attribute after the fact).
Certainly no more so than the effects of continuing to mess around with the environment as we are.
Seriously, has the human population been reducing the amount of ozone-depleting activities... I thought we were still pumping out the carbon monoxide at apocalyptic rates.
You're mixing up different problems and different chemicals.
We have reduced chloroflorocarbon - CFC - production pretty well. CFCs are what attack the ozone layer.
Carbon dioxide - CO2 - emmissions continue to be high. You get it every time you burn something or breathe out; but the problem is that burning fossil fuels adds more C02 to the air than the normal biological cycle. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but not toxic.
Carbon monoxide - CO - is a toxic gas. This is what kills you if you leave your car running in a closed garage; it is often used for killing animals. It results from ineffecient combustion. Catalytic converters and oxygenated fuels have reduced CO emissions over the past few years.
Summary:
CFCs - ozone killer. Emissions down, but potential that newly industrialized nations may start pumping the stuff out again.
Carbon dioxide - greenhouse gas. (One of several.) Emissions up. To reduce CO2 emissions we have to stop burning fossil fuels.
Carbon monoxide - toxic. Mostly comes out of our vehicle's tailpipes. Emissions down but still a significant health problem in large cities.
TCEA is a bad law, but it falls clearly within those bounds
No, it doesn't - you're missing the most important part, the same thing most people are missing: the phrase "to Authors and Inventors".
Not to their heirs, not to their assignees, not to their employers. Any claim of copyright not asserted by the actual people who created the wrk in question, is constituionally bogus. When the author or inventor dies, the work reverts to the public domain.
X sansKDE is easy enough to use, but looks and feels very little like MS Windows or MacOS - X provides mechanism, not policy. KDE and Gnome give you a fancy-schmancy sets of applications that share the same look and feel.
But yes, every one that I know of who has been to college was told in their Lit 101 and 102 classes that you DO NOT use contractions in formal works.
Well, I AP'd out of English 100 in my undergrad days. But in high school, in the junior-level composition class, in a literature class, in the philosopy classes, the physics classes, even the music classes, I don't recall ever being graded down for using a contraction, or told that their use was forbidden.
Yes, I agree that the more formal the tone, the fewer the contractions, and I'd concur with advice to avoid them in very formal writing. But I'd never heard of such a total condemnation of their use until this discussion; and frankly. like most blanket proscriptions, it strikes me as pretty dumb.
If you take a more libertarian view of softare freedom -- the ability to do whatever the hell you want to the software -- then requiring one to distribute source code when one prefers not to is actually restricting freedom.
When compared against a situation where everyone has the right to "do whatever the hell you want to the software", perhaps. But that's not the case under current copyright law. Under current conditions, the GPL adds to your freedom - without it, nothing permits you to distribute the software at all.
If copyright law went away and we could copy and distribute binaries willy-nilly, there's be no reason not to make source available, and market forces would make open source the norm. But given the interference of copyright applied to software, the GPL is a freedom-enhancer.
Points would definitely be subtracted for using informal speech in a formal essay.
I think very few modern American readers would find an occasional well-placed "don't" instead of "do not" to be excessively informal.
And if you really think that your two sentences mean different things, or have different tone, you should consider asking for a refund for your schooling. You're confusing written word and actual speech
It applies to both written and spoken language. If those two constructions did not have a different tone, then the proscription of contractions would not just be overly simplistic, but entirely meaningless. If they are identical, what reason did your teachers give for the total ban on contractions?
"Will not" has a different effect on the reader than "won't". The difference is greater in spoken text than in the written word; but pretending that there is a complete separation between the written and spoken word leads to ineffective writing. One of the best tests of the written word is still to read it aloud (or at least subvocalize).
In formal written papers using a contraction will lose you points in college.
I've never lost points or been corrected for properly using contractions. Not in school, not in college, not in graduate school, not in the workplace (where I've done a fair amount of technical writing, some of it reviewed by professional writers).
Of course, using or not using contractions does affect the tone of the piece. Consider the difference between "we won't let this stop us" and "we will not let this stop us" - the latter is stronger, but not necessarily more "correct" than the former. Choosing the proper tone is part of the writer's craft.
imagine that there were a level of "hidden variables" complex enough that each quanta (quark, lepton, what have you) could have as much "state" as the entire universe as-we-know it.
IANAP (I did do about half the coursework towards a physics degree, but didn't get to the QM stuff), but I think that Bell's inqualtity applies regardles of the number of hidden variables you try to invoke. The evidence is stongly - but not definitively - on the side that it does not hold and there are no hidden variables.
But even putting that aside...
The point being, there's no way we could detect that this was the case...and thus there's know way we can prove that it isn't the case.
There's also now way that you could detect that case that miniature invisible alien Elvis clones are living in your walls and are eating your missing socks. That doesn't mean that it's a hypothesis that should be taken seriously.
Heck, why not go all the way and consider the hypothesis that the entire observed universe is a computer-generated illusion that we experience while evil AIs use our real bodies as power sources.
IMHO, invoking a universe's worth of hidden state per particle just because you don't like the idea of a random universe isn't much less silly than that.
And if there are 'truly' random events...we'll never know it, since this would be indistinguishable from deterministic events we simply haven't figured out how to predict yet.
Yes, we will. There are truly random events - radioacitve decay, for example. This randomness is distinguishable from so-called "hidden variable" interpretations.
In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting.
You could say the same thing about the American rebellion against the British Empire. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, indeed the very notion of the "United States of America", came years later.
And please explain, why just five minute after Obi-Wan convinces Annikin that he must abandon Padme to "do his duty", does Yoda abandon his duty to the Republic in order to save two useless Jedi?
Because in the end, Yoda - and the Jedi - are screw-ups.
We know the future. They lose. The fact that they're showing flaws is not a plot problem - it's necessary. Tragic flaws and all like that.
The Postman is also excellect. Pay no attention to the movie, everyone involved in that should be taken out and shot; but the book, while a little rough around the edges (it's his first novel, IIRC), is fantastic.
Even alluding to the thought that our country might ever share these practices tells me that whoever wrote that line really never paid attention in American History class.
Anyone who thinks that any evil is completely unthinkable from any nation, never really paid attention in history class.
There's a certain argument that there's a long term benefit to using free software in terms of dollars and customizability.
And freedom.
That is a consideration, you know. Unless you want the industry to be owned by criminal corporations like MSFT. Using free - or at least, non-criminally produced - software is like buying stuff made in the USA by union workers instead of in China by prison laborers (on in the USA by prison laborers, for that matter); it may be more expensive in the short run, but in the long run you're buying the kind of world you want to live in.
Why not replace the dead battery? That's what I did in my Black and Decker cordless electric. (In my case, I did have to crack the plastic body, since the bolts had rusted, but it was nothing duct tape couldn't fix.) A hell of a lot cheaper than a new mower, and more enviromentally benign than throwing the old one away.
I'm sure you could order a replacement battery from the manufacturer. It's the Right Thing To Do.
has the power to block any server from sending mail, by placing it on a blackhole list.
Placing someone on a list doesn't block them from sending mail. The list makers wield no power. They simply advise those who do have power - the system administrators, who may, at their discrestion, choose to block servers on such a list.
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of application are you writing where any of the differences are significant?
It's a Unix-oid platform. If you're writing user apps you should be able to write your software so as to be able to compile and run on GNU/Linux, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, or whatever, with only a few #ifdefs.
The issue is not sex with children, the issue is speech about sex with children. NAMBLA can believe that sex with children is ok; they can say that sex with children is ok; they can work for changes to the law; they're even allowed to talk about how to (in general) get children to want to have sex with adults. (Yes, personally it gives me the creeps to think about, but it also gives me the creeps to think about people watching televangelists.)
Destroying the ecological systems on which we all depend is terrorism.
Publicized tree-spiking may be considered "destruction of property", since it renders the trees unsuitable for logging (though how a tree ever gets to be considered "property" in the first place is problematic), but it's not terrorism. If someone knowingly goes into a forest that has thus been rendered unsuitable for logging, tries to cut down a tree and gets killed...think of it as evolution in action.
We're talking about legal fees. Legal fees go to defend the accused. You know, those guys we're supposed to presume are innocent until they're proven guilty?
Free speech is free speech. What, they should defend the Nazi party's free speech right but not NAMBLA's? It's all or nothing.
Not quite. They made a donation to cover some people's legal fees. And some people have an odd defintion of the word "terrorist".I'm afriad you've got it mixed up. The tactic is called "SLAPP" - Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation - and it's widely used by large corporations to silence their critics.
Only if you consider an outcome whereby corporate wrongdoers can operate without fear a positive outcome...This is almost why "loser pays" is a horrible idea. Amalgamated Profits, Inc. is poisioning your town? Under loser pays, if you try to sue and their high priced lawyers beat the ones you managed to scrape enough pennies together to hire, not only are you poisoned and broke from your own legal fees, you've got to pay Amalgamated Profits, Inc.'s fees. So you don't dare sue.
If they don't stand up to fuckheads like this, they can't keep up a kickass search engine, because they'll have to filter everything that some fuckhead might sue over.
As a temporary stopgap as we move to sustainable energy, perhaps they may be of use. They're certainly interesting to think about.
However, until we have a much deeper understanding of ecology I'd have to say it's much wiser to give priority to stopping our f*cking around with the spaceship's life support system and letting it reset itself, than to f*cking with it some more in hopes of balancing out our first f*ckups.
The difference is not that great, perhaps on the order of 10 percent. (Some say that there's no significant difference at all. There are others who claim that organic methods have very low yields, but I think agriculture research sponsored by Dow and Monsanto has about the same credibility as lung cancer research sponsored by Phillip Morris.) Considering that most organic farmers are new to the methods involved, we can expect yields to rise as experience is gained.
Also, if you want to talk land use you need to factor in the land used for energy production, the land taken up by chemical plants, the land used up by drilling and mining operations, the land used for waste disposal of all of these operations, and the land eventually rendered unsuitable for agriculture by non-sustainable methods.
That's not even factoring in water pollution from fertilizer and pesticide production and runoff, air pollution from chemical production and energy production. And not even touching on the health costs of pesticide contamination in the finished food product.
Considering the total resource footprint, organic is the clear winner.
And there's little "conventional" about chemical-saturated high-yield farming - it represents a very small slice of humanity's experience with agriculture.
Certainly no more so than the effects of continuing to mess around with the environment as we are.
A self-contradictory story is, by definition, incorrect.
You're mixing up different problems and different chemicals.
We have reduced chloroflorocarbon - CFC - production pretty well. CFCs are what attack the ozone layer.
Carbon dioxide - CO2 - emmissions continue to be high. You get it every time you burn something or breathe out; but the problem is that burning fossil fuels adds more C02 to the air than the normal biological cycle. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but not toxic.
Carbon monoxide - CO - is a toxic gas. This is what kills you if you leave your car running in a closed garage; it is often used for killing animals. It results from ineffecient combustion. Catalytic converters and oxygenated fuels have reduced CO emissions over the past few years.
Summary:
No, it doesn't - you're missing the most important part, the same thing most people are missing: the phrase "to Authors and Inventors".
Not to their heirs, not to their assignees, not to their employers. Any claim of copyright not asserted by the actual people who created the wrk in question, is constituionally bogus. When the author or inventor dies, the work reverts to the public domain.
KDE is not a windowing system. X is a window system, while KDE is a "graphical desktop environment" layered on top of X.
X sansKDE is easy enough to use, but looks and feels very little like MS Windows or MacOS - X provides mechanism, not policy. KDE and Gnome give you a fancy-schmancy sets of applications that share the same look and feel.
Well, I AP'd out of English 100 in my undergrad days. But in high school, in the junior-level composition class, in a literature class, in the philosopy classes, the physics classes, even the music classes, I don't recall ever being graded down for using a contraction, or told that their use was forbidden.
Yes, I agree that the more formal the tone, the fewer the contractions, and I'd concur with advice to avoid them in very formal writing. But I'd never heard of such a total condemnation of their use until this discussion; and frankly. like most blanket proscriptions, it strikes me as pretty dumb.
When compared against a situation where everyone has the right to "do whatever the hell you want to the software", perhaps. But that's not the case under current copyright law. Under current conditions, the GPL adds to your freedom - without it, nothing permits you to distribute the software at all.
If copyright law went away and we could copy and distribute binaries willy-nilly, there's be no reason not to make source available, and market forces would make open source the norm. But given the interference of copyright applied to software, the GPL is a freedom-enhancer.
I think very few modern American readers would find an occasional well-placed "don't" instead of "do not" to be excessively informal.
It applies to both written and spoken language. If those two constructions did not have a different tone, then the proscription of contractions would not just be overly simplistic, but entirely meaningless. If they are identical, what reason did your teachers give for the total ban on contractions?
"Will not" has a different effect on the reader than "won't". The difference is greater in spoken text than in the written word; but pretending that there is a complete separation between the written and spoken word leads to ineffective writing. One of the best tests of the written word is still to read it aloud (or at least subvocalize).
I've never lost points or been corrected for properly using contractions. Not in school, not in college, not in graduate school, not in the workplace (where I've done a fair amount of technical writing, some of it reviewed by professional writers).
Of course, using or not using contractions does affect the tone of the piece. Consider the difference between "we won't let this stop us" and "we will not let this stop us" - the latter is stronger, but not necessarily more "correct" than the former. Choosing the proper tone is part of the writer's craft.
IANAP (I did do about half the coursework towards a physics degree, but didn't get to the QM stuff), but I think that Bell's inqualtity applies regardles of the number of hidden variables you try to invoke. The evidence is stongly - but not definitively - on the side that it does not hold and there are no hidden variables.
But even putting that aside...
There's also now way that you could detect that case that miniature invisible alien Elvis clones are living in your walls and are eating your missing socks. That doesn't mean that it's a hypothesis that should be taken seriously.
Heck, why not go all the way and consider the hypothesis that the entire observed universe is a computer-generated illusion that we experience while evil AIs use our real bodies as power sources.
IMHO, invoking a universe's worth of hidden state per particle just because you don't like the idea of a random universe isn't much less silly than that.
Yes, we will. There are truly random events - radioacitve decay, for example. This randomness is distinguishable from so-called "hidden variable" interpretations.
You could say the same thing about the American rebellion against the British Empire. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, indeed the very notion of the "United States of America", came years later.
Because in the end, Yoda - and the Jedi - are screw-ups.
We know the future. They lose. The fact that they're showing flaws is not a plot problem - it's necessary. Tragic flaws and all like that.
The Postman is also excellect. Pay no attention to the movie, everyone involved in that should be taken out and shot; but the book, while a little rough around the edges (it's his first novel, IIRC), is fantastic.
And freedom.
That is a consideration, you know. Unless you want the industry to be owned by criminal corporations like MSFT. Using free - or at least, non-criminally produced - software is like buying stuff made in the USA by union workers instead of in China by prison laborers (on in the USA by prison laborers, for that matter); it may be more expensive in the short run, but in the long run you're buying the kind of world you want to live in.
Why not replace the dead battery? That's what I did in my Black and Decker cordless electric. (In my case, I did have to crack the plastic body, since the bolts had rusted, but it was nothing duct tape couldn't fix.) A hell of a lot cheaper than a new mower, and more enviromentally benign than throwing the old one away.
I'm sure you could order a replacement battery from the manufacturer. It's the Right Thing To Do.
Placing someone on a list doesn't block them from sending mail. The list makers wield no power. They simply advise those who do have power - the system administrators, who may, at their discrestion, choose to block servers on such a list.