Mubarak's authoritarianism is orthogonal to Islam. People don't need religion to be power-hungry. Authoritarianism can show up quite well in Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, Taoist, or atheist populations.
Several unrelated outages across the United States is not the same as a pervasive, related, unified outage affecting all customers.
There's also the fact that some areas -- like Baltimore -- had heavy snow last night. I have Sprint's WiMax (which is, from what I can figure out, the same network as Clear), and it was spotty last night, but I'm not sure if that was due to problems in their network, or due to weather-related signal problems. I'm near the edge of the service area -- though I have four or five bars most of the time, in heavy precipitation sometimes the signal drops out for a bit.
Or, less radically, use Facebook without the stupid and pointless "check in" feature.
Since my business plan is
Relentless self-promotion
???
Profit!
I find Facebook, Twitter, etc., to be useful. I do not, however, find any use in an API to allow Facebook, Twitter, etc.,'s advertisers to track my movements.
If it were true, you could identify, say, Jews or Muslims or Protestants (since people who call themselves "Christians" are generally Papists) who argue against religion as a "screened attack" on Catholics.
This makes so little sense that I've got to ask if you left out some key point.
Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism are religions. Those who practice a specific religion can't (consistently or sanely, anyway) make arguments against religion-in-general.
Catholics make up only about half of Christians in the world, and a much smaller percentage of Christians in English-speaking nations. It is not the case that people who call themselves "Christians" are generally Catholics.
And "Papists"? Really? Are you posting from 16th century England?
The grandparent comment is quite correct: people often engage in anti-religion rhetoric that is really only applicable to mainstream Christianity (or at least to mainstream Abrahamic religions). They make sweeping statements about religion in general based on their exposure to mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and maybe a Muslim or two; but you'll often find that those sweeping statements don't apply well to, say, Quakers, Zen Buddhists, Hindus, Jews in the Renewal movement, Sufis, various varieties of Neopagans, Taoists, Unitarian Universalists, etc., etc., etc.
And what is exactly the christian message? Be week, sick and mediocre?
Some folks focus on that, sure.
Other folks focus on ideas like "love thy neighbor," "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "blessed are the peacemakers." Of course those ideas are not unique to Xianity, but I've no beef with someone who finds the Jesus myth an inspiring presentation of them.
If, for example, every store you visit tracked your comings & goings and your purchase history, would you still scream bloody murder? NO, because they all already do this and nobody seems to give a rat's ass.
Pardon? I would indeed be upset if every store I visited tracked my comings and goings and purchase history, especially of they coordinated with other stores to build a profile in order to figure out how best to manipulate my purchasing preferences. That's why I usually pay cash, and never use one of those "please spy on me" (a.k.a. "customer loyalty") cards at any chain store.
There are a handful of independent businesses that I frequent where I know the owners or employees and they know me and my preferences -- great, that's a symmetric and respectful relationship. Doubleclick sneaking cookies on to my browser so they can sell my habits to the highest bidder, is not.
Maybe 30 years ago, but you really don't see much of that now.
I still see plenty of assholes who think that displaying the flag of the terrorist organization that styled itself the "Confederate States of America" is cool. And I don't mean in the deep South, I mean in Maryland (which was not a Confederate state) and even Pennsylvania (which is north of the Mason-Dixon line and is in no one's definition a "southern" state). I recently had to write a letter of protest to a national vendor who thought that pro-slavery terrorist logos were cool enough to put on their merch.
If Israel separated religion from government, it would have to acknowledge that some invisible dude in the sky did not in fact promise that piece of real estate to the descendants of Abraham. That kind of screws up their whole nation's raison d'etre.
Yeah, because it's not like the Jews or Muslim to carry a grudge for hundreds of years, right?
It's convenient to dismiss the problem of Palestine as a problem between Jews and Muslims that's been going on for hundreds of years.
It's also wrong.
When Spain and Portugal persecuted Jews in the late 15th/early 16th century, the Ottoman empire welcomed them. Jews and Muslims lived together in Palestine in relative peace until the British Mandate and the Balfour declaration of 1917. The thrice-dammed British decided that stealing land from Arabs and giving it to Jews would advance the interests of their Empire. Somehow, the Arabs found this idea upsetting and starting fighting back.
Most of the conflicts now going on in the Middle East and Europe have their roots in the colonialism of European powers. We're still fighting out the aftermath of WWI.
After watching the 'peace' process break down again and again here. You have to realize *NEITHER* side is really interested in it.
The "peace" process has been Israel and the U.S. telling the people of Palestine to, essentially, "relax and enjoy it". No, the Palestinians are not interested in that, but over and over their leadership has shown an interest in sincerely working for peace. It's not surprising that they cannot find a reliable partner for peace and justice in Israel, any more than the Native Americans nations have ever been able to find a reliable partner for peace and justice with the U.S. government.
In short, in this case, the right of way is still too tightly regulated to allow for competition, only one cable company is allowed to lay cable wire for example.
Laying cable requires rights-of-way and easements. If I start my own cable company, do I get to dig up the street in front of your house? Or better, do I get to dig up your yard to run my cable to your neighbor?
The physical realities (I know, not the strong suit of laissez-faire capitalists;-) ) of utilities services dictate that a common infrastructure is best: one set of water pipes, one set of gas pipes, one set of power cables, etc. That infrastructure ought to be publicly owned. Sure, let private companies compete on contracts to build and maintain that infrastructure, and to provide services through it.
You'd be able to choose from dozens of Internet Companies, rather than just one, and lousy companies like quest would go bankrupt from lose of customers.
Uh huh. Just like telephone dereguation brought me dozens of companies for my landline, and cable TV deregulation brought me dozens of companies competing to offer me cable TV.
Like just take my parents for example, they live around 600 meters from the closest grocery store and 150 meters from the nearest bus stop. Not great distances, but when they're both retirees with not the best of legs they're not going to walk + bus + walk again carrying the bags.
Which points up an advantage of public transit: a lifetime of walking would make it more likely that old people didn't find a measly 600 meters too far to walk. Sure, there's the occasional handicapped person, and the system must accommodate that; but the shamefully poor health of the average American is largely due to lack of exercise, and that lack of exercise is largely due to the cult of the automobile.
Look at Japan for a working mass transit + old people model. Or hell, do you think there's not old people in Manhattan? Public transportation is great benefit to the elderly, it give them independence when they become unable to drive.
The "dark side" of the moon always faces away from the earth.
The "far side" of the moon always faces away from earth. The "far side" is often mistakenly called the "dark side". But at any given time, there is an actual dark side, just as there is on earth -- i.e., a night side. Though the night side and day side shift places over the course of a lunar "day", it should still be possible in theory to run a heat engine.
Might even be possible to run a heat engine off the temperature difference in one place over time: gas filled cylinder with a piston. Put it in the lunar sunlight, gas expands, moves the piston. Night falls, gas cools, piston moves back. This would be impractical on Earth, where nights aren't that much cooler than days, but with the greater lunar temperature difference...maybe. At least a groovy physics experiment.
When using brackets or quote marks the punctuation at the end of a sentence goes inside the marks if it is part of the inner sentence, otherwise it goes on the outside.
There are weird typographical conventions here, and British and American usage differ. See Hacker Writing Style in the Jargon File.
Saying "one hundred ten" sounds like it should be written "100, 10". Use "and" to show the connection, i.e. "one hundred and ten".
Stuff and nonsense. Do you say "twenty and one"? Do you say "two thousand and two hundred and twenty and two"? The proper formal name of the number "110" is "one hundred ten".
"One hundred and ten" or "a hundred and ten" are vernacular forms, acceptable in everyday speech but giving a bad impression if used formally. Which engineer makes a better impression, the one who tells you "the length of this piece is one hundred ten centimeters" or the one who says "the length of this piece is a hundred and ten centimeters"?
I don't post anything on my profile or anywhere else that I consider to be important. I don't post pictures of my children on Facebook (and nor does my wife).
Uh...why?
Surely you understand that the paranoia about child abduction is mostly overblown? And that someone who decides to kidnap a kid isn't going to go to Facebook looking at parent-posted photos like some sort of child rapist's catalog, he/she is going to drive the street is his/her windowless van offering candy? And that you can control who can see your photos on Facebook, so you can share photos of your kids with friends and family but not strangers?
Unfortunately that is not true. There are many people who leak for many reasons.
"Unfortunately???" Not at all. We are indeed fortunate that there are people in the intelligence world who leak information about illegal covert activities. Democracy depends on them.
If someone knew that she was doing it, and then told someone, the information would become probable cause; than an affidavit is filed, and a warrant obtained. That's how due process works.
Warrants restrain governments, not private individuals. Due process protects individual citizens, not government agents in the course of their jobs. If this was a government agent, or a person working on behalf of government agents, investigating a private citizen, I'd agree; but this case was the exact opposite, a private citizen investigating a government agent's execution of her duties.
He shouldn't have been doing "this kind of stuff". This isn't white-hat/grey-hat stuff, this is cracking an account with bad intentions and result.
Palin lost the privacy rights of her personal e-mail account when she tried to use it to conduct official business, in order to circumvent the openness requirements of official records. This was ham-fisted and poorly done, but it was white- or grey-hat work.
Lockheed-Martin? You assume they could afford to pay for a tank out of their own pocket, especially a tank built (as you put it) in the most expensive way possible. The result would very likely be the financial doom of the company, causing hundreds if not thousands of people to lose their jobs.
So the feds should effectively bail out Lockheed-Martin, by writing off the loss and freeing them from a contractual obligation? (Assuming such obligation exists -- it's entirely possible there's some loophole here.)
Nope, sorry. Lockheed Martin stockholders gambled, if they loose, too bad, free market in action; if a corporation can't meet its obligations, no reason for it to exist.
As for employees, it would make more sense to bail them out directly with unemployment payments and jobs programs than to bail out a failed company. If LM goes belly-up, their competitors will have more business and will be hiring.
After all, statistics says that if one flips a coin 10 times, one will get around 5 heads and 5 tails
No, it doesn't say that at all. Statistics of a fair coin flip say that you might get 0, 5, 10, or any integer number in between, heads. It tells you that you're more likely to get 5 (probability 0.24609, if my math is right) than 0 or 10 (probability.00097 each), but it does not rule out 0 or 10.
I make the probability of getting 4, 5, or 6 heads on 10 coin flips to be 0.64648. If I bet you that there will be 4, 5, or 6 heads, and in fact there are some other number, does that mean my theory was wrong? Nope.
Similarly, climate modeling tells us that we are more likely to have a warming trend over the next decade. It does not rule out cooling -- due to, say, a volcanic eruption, or a decrease in insolation, or some other factor unrelated to greenhouse gasses and urban heat islands temporarily overwhelming the warming trend. (Or due to some brilliant new technology that extracts huge amounts of CO2 and methane from the air, or some massive change in human behavior.)
Slashdot Mirror
One can help the human race continue and thrive in ways other than breeding, you know. Newton had no children.
Just what do you mean by "a Muslim state?" Bangladesh is a secular democracy with a mostly Muslim population. So is Turkey.
Mubarak's authoritarianism is orthogonal to Islam. People don't need religion to be power-hungry. Authoritarianism can show up quite well in Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, Taoist, or atheist populations.
There's also the fact that some areas -- like Baltimore -- had heavy snow last night. I have Sprint's WiMax (which is, from what I can figure out, the same network as Clear), and it was spotty last night, but I'm not sure if that was due to problems in their network, or due to weather-related signal problems. I'm near the edge of the service area -- though I have four or five bars most of the time, in heavy precipitation sometimes the signal drops out for a bit.
Or, less radically, use Facebook without the stupid and pointless "check in" feature.
Since my business plan is
I find Facebook, Twitter, etc., to be useful. I do not, however, find any use in an API to allow Facebook, Twitter, etc.,'s advertisers to track my movements.
This makes so little sense that I've got to ask if you left out some key point.
Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism are religions. Those who practice a specific religion can't (consistently or sanely, anyway) make arguments against religion-in-general.
Catholics make up only about half of Christians in the world, and a much smaller percentage of Christians in English-speaking nations. It is not the case that people who call themselves "Christians" are generally Catholics.
And "Papists"? Really? Are you posting from 16th century England?
The grandparent comment is quite correct: people often engage in anti-religion rhetoric that is really only applicable to mainstream Christianity (or at least to mainstream Abrahamic religions). They make sweeping statements about religion in general based on their exposure to mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and maybe a Muslim or two; but you'll often find that those sweeping statements don't apply well to, say, Quakers, Zen Buddhists, Hindus, Jews in the Renewal movement, Sufis, various varieties of Neopagans, Taoists, Unitarian Universalists, etc., etc., etc.
Some folks focus on that, sure.
Other folks focus on ideas like "love thy neighbor," "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "blessed are the peacemakers." Of course those ideas are not unique to Xianity, but I've no beef with someone who finds the Jesus myth an inspiring presentation of them.
Pardon? I would indeed be upset if every store I visited tracked my comings and goings and purchase history, especially of they coordinated with other stores to build a profile in order to figure out how best to manipulate my purchasing preferences. That's why I usually pay cash, and never use one of those "please spy on me" (a.k.a. "customer loyalty") cards at any chain store.
There are a handful of independent businesses that I frequent where I know the owners or employees and they know me and my preferences -- great, that's a symmetric and respectful relationship. Doubleclick sneaking cookies on to my browser so they can sell my habits to the highest bidder, is not.
On what evidence to you make such a conclusion? Given that London's pervasive use of CCTV cameras has failed to make people there safer and that other cities have also found them ineffective in preventing violent crime, why do you think that putting a CCTV camera in a drone has positive benefits that outweigh the chilling effects of their certain use to spy on political dissidents? If you want to know how something like this will really be used, check out the recent Frontline report on domestic surveillance.
I still see plenty of assholes who think that displaying the flag of the terrorist organization that styled itself the "Confederate States of America" is cool. And I don't mean in the deep South, I mean in Maryland (which was not a Confederate state) and even Pennsylvania (which is north of the Mason-Dixon line and is in no one's definition a "southern" state). I recently had to write a letter of protest to a national vendor who thought that pro-slavery terrorist logos were cool enough to put on their merch.
What? You must be joking. Israel defines itself as Jewish state. Its laws grant official recognition just to the Abrahamic religions descended from Judaism, and only to certain sects of those. Only religious marriages are recognized. Israeli law forbids Jews to work on the Sabbath. People who convert to Judaism are granted automatic citizenship and residence rights.
If Israel separated religion from government, it would have to acknowledge that some invisible dude in the sky did not in fact promise that piece of real estate to the descendants of Abraham. That kind of screws up their whole nation's raison d'etre.
It's convenient to dismiss the problem of Palestine as a problem between Jews and Muslims that's been going on for hundreds of years.
It's also wrong.
When Spain and Portugal persecuted Jews in the late 15th/early 16th century, the Ottoman empire welcomed them. Jews and Muslims lived together in Palestine in relative peace until the British Mandate and the Balfour declaration of 1917. The thrice-dammed British decided that stealing land from Arabs and giving it to Jews would advance the interests of their Empire. Somehow, the Arabs found this idea upsetting and starting fighting back.
Most of the conflicts now going on in the Middle East and Europe have their roots in the colonialism of European powers. We're still fighting out the aftermath of WWI.
The "peace" process has been Israel and the U.S. telling the people of Palestine to, essentially, "relax and enjoy it". No, the Palestinians are not interested in that, but over and over their leadership has shown an interest in sincerely working for peace. It's not surprising that they cannot find a reliable partner for peace and justice in Israel, any more than the Native Americans nations have ever been able to find a reliable partner for peace and justice with the U.S. government.
So let's see...to implement image expiration on my website, I can ask all my members to install your plugin...or I can add
to my image upload module. Gee, which way should I go?
And this illustrates why RMS has a point when he harps on the "GNU/Linux" thing...
Laying cable requires rights-of-way and easements. If I start my own cable company, do I get to dig up the street in front of your house? Or better, do I get to dig up your yard to run my cable to your neighbor?
The physical realities (I know, not the strong suit of laissez-faire capitalists ;-) ) of utilities services dictate that a common infrastructure is best: one set of water pipes, one set of gas pipes, one set of power cables, etc. That infrastructure ought to be publicly owned. Sure, let private companies compete on contracts to build and maintain that infrastructure, and to provide services through it.
Uh huh. Just like telephone dereguation brought me dozens of companies for my landline, and cable TV deregulation brought me dozens of companies competing to offer me cable TV.
Chortle. Guffaw.
Which points up an advantage of public transit: a lifetime of walking would make it more likely that old people didn't find a measly 600 meters too far to walk. Sure, there's the occasional handicapped person, and the system must accommodate that; but the shamefully poor health of the average American is largely due to lack of exercise, and that lack of exercise is largely due to the cult of the automobile.
Look at Japan for a working mass transit + old people model. Or hell, do you think there's not old people in Manhattan? Public transportation is great benefit to the elderly, it give them independence when they become unable to drive.
The "far side" of the moon always faces away from earth. The "far side" is often mistakenly called the "dark side". But at any given time, there is an actual dark side, just as there is on earth -- i.e., a night side. Though the night side and day side shift places over the course of a lunar "day", it should still be possible in theory to run a heat engine.
Might even be possible to run a heat engine off the temperature difference in one place over time: gas filled cylinder with a piston. Put it in the lunar sunlight, gas expands, moves the piston. Night falls, gas cools, piston moves back. This would be impractical on Earth, where nights aren't that much cooler than days, but with the greater lunar temperature difference...maybe. At least a groovy physics experiment.
There are weird typographical conventions here, and British and American usage differ. See Hacker Writing Style in the Jargon File.
Stuff and nonsense. Do you say "twenty and one"? Do you say "two thousand and two hundred and twenty and two"? The proper formal name of the number "110" is "one hundred ten".
"One hundred and ten" or "a hundred and ten" are vernacular forms, acceptable in everyday speech but giving a bad impression if used formally. Which engineer makes a better impression, the one who tells you "the length of this piece is one hundred ten centimeters" or the one who says "the length of this piece is a hundred and ten centimeters"?
Uh...why?
Surely you understand that the paranoia about child abduction is mostly overblown? And that someone who decides to kidnap a kid isn't going to go to Facebook looking at parent-posted photos like some sort of child rapist's catalog, he/she is going to drive the street is his/her windowless van offering candy? And that you can control who can see your photos on Facebook, so you can share photos of your kids with friends and family but not strangers?
"Unfortunately???" Not at all. We are indeed fortunate that there are people in the intelligence world who leak information about illegal covert activities. Democracy depends on them.
She most certainly did, and that fact has been public knowledge since before the crack. "Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public." -- Washington Post, September 10, 2008. The e-mail crack occurred days after that story was published, on September 16.
Warrants restrain governments, not private individuals. Due process protects individual citizens, not government agents in the course of their jobs. If this was a government agent, or a person working on behalf of government agents, investigating a private citizen, I'd agree; but this case was the exact opposite, a private citizen investigating a government agent's execution of her duties.
Palin lost the privacy rights of her personal e-mail account when she tried to use it to conduct official business, in order to circumvent the openness requirements of official records. This was ham-fisted and poorly done, but it was white- or grey-hat work.
So the feds should effectively bail out Lockheed-Martin, by writing off the loss and freeing them from a contractual obligation? (Assuming such obligation exists -- it's entirely possible there's some loophole here.)
Nope, sorry. Lockheed Martin stockholders gambled, if they loose, too bad, free market in action; if a corporation can't meet its obligations, no reason for it to exist.
As for employees, it would make more sense to bail them out directly with unemployment payments and jobs programs than to bail out a failed company. If LM goes belly-up, their competitors will have more business and will be hiring.
No, it doesn't say that at all. Statistics of a fair coin flip say that you might get 0, 5, 10, or any integer number in between, heads. It tells you that you're more likely to get 5 (probability 0.24609, if my math is right) than 0 or 10 (probability .00097 each), but it does not rule out 0 or 10.
I make the probability of getting 4, 5, or 6 heads on 10 coin flips to be 0.64648. If I bet you that there will be 4, 5, or 6 heads, and in fact there are some other number, does that mean my theory was wrong? Nope.
Similarly, climate modeling tells us that we are more likely to have a warming trend over the next decade. It does not rule out cooling -- due to, say, a volcanic eruption, or a decrease in insolation, or some other factor unrelated to greenhouse gasses and urban heat islands temporarily overwhelming the warming trend. (Or due to some brilliant new technology that extracts huge amounts of CO2 and methane from the air, or some massive change in human behavior.)