It is very trivial to script a properly built GUI. [...]
How? Why? From HCI and study of disability access we know that every action possible in a GUI should be performable with out a mouse. On Microsoft Certified Software this usually means everything has a contextually unique hotkey.
Great, so now we've got a script that's not portable to people using other locales.
it may not be different enough from an earlier song called "Good Morning to All", whose U.S. copyright has already expired, to be considered a distinct work worthy of a separate copyright.
If you want to play legal theory, fine, go for it. But Time Warner enforces its copyright on Happy Birthday on a regular basis for good money, and no one has ever effectively challenged it. For all intents and purposes, unless you've got decent money for a court case, it's copyrighted.
Copyrights hinder things from becoming 'common' in our culture, and life becomes bland. Imagine if noone knew the words to 'happy birthday' or common Christmas carols...
What's your point? "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, and that hasn't hurt it.
Democracy worked fairly well when the vote was restricted to the competent, but those days are long gone.
You mean like the days when thousands of innocent, civilized, people were forced from their homes so their churches could been turned into beer halls? Yes, the Trail of Tears (i.e. the eviction of the Cherokee) was a great success of democracy.
It is precisely this sort of "we know best for everyone" thinking that starts wars. Your country is your business, and other peoples countries are their businesses respectively.
The extreme of that is when we tolerate genocide because it's their nation. We're all human, and it's not irrational to think that one code of ethics is best for all of us. Loud transcultural debates and arguments are good for helping to discover that optimal code of ethics.
They are showing true respect for Chinese society and sensitivities, which is precisely the way that all humans should interact with each other.
So you're not showing true respect for Chinese society and sensitivities, which say that all humans should be socialized according to Marxist norms. Your concept that what we consider evil in our culture should be tolerated in others is alien and hostile to many cultures, and your opinion that that's how they should act is itself not acting the way you think they should act.
A better question is why is a thirty year old work not in the public domain? Let me answer that, because this aspect of the government is owned by the entertainment industry.
Or because authors got really pissed off when publishers would starting printing their early books and they wouldn't see a cent for them, especially if they got screwed with in the process.
We did not splurge on the Internet. Nope... For once, something was done (mostly) right -- with little money and little government intrusion.
Ever heard of ARPANet?
Even with that, saying "the government" built most of the roads is obscuring the issue. Every city, every state voted as a community to build roads. If they had somehow been stopped from doing so, it would have been done privately and through semi-governmental groups.
Yes, the modern flying apparata are not too user-friendly.
I'm not talking about user-friendly. I'm talking about energy-efficent.
A good helicopter would not stop working, just like modern brakes do not stop braking
You're comparing apples and oranges. Brakes are just one small part of a car. A helicopter would need the engine running to stay in the air. Car engines run out of gas, or overheat or stop working for a myraid of reasons every day. Very rarely is that a life or death situation; you just pull over to the side of the road. A helicopter would fall to the ground; any engine failure would be a life or death situation.
See what? In WWI, there wasn't mass civilian killings; but there were a lot of them made up for propoganda value. In WWII, the Germans paid dearly for their actions against civilians, starting with losing the war against Britain because they targeted London instead of military targets, and extended on to continuing issues with the Holocaust. Dresden is still high on the propaganda value.
What Vietnam teaches us is that if you don't have a clear military target, wars are a pain in the ass.
As for the Japanese bombings, it does indeed raise questions about the generality of the rule. But Japan was a united government that could stop the war at its choice. It worked by sending a clear message to those who controlled the power to stop the attacks. Iran doesn't control Al-Quedid. No government does.
It doesn't matter who said it, becasue it's out of context and they clearly didn't understand what it meant. It's about reparation.
Not unless we're robots, and can just plug that eye into our empty eye socket. Reparation would have been "a donkey for a donkey". According to a Baptist preacher I once talked to, it's about limiting the amount of vengence.
He said "would you do it? I would." So we're obviously talking about my culture and his, not the culture of the bombers. Maybe you think your life worth so little as a few innocent lives and hitting the news for one day, in a tit for tat that could go on forever, but I would want to do something that people couldn't just shrug off as just another attack.
Without it, we could well have had usable and affordable little helicopters by now, for example.
And look at our splurging on the Internet. Without it, we could have direct brain to brain connects.
It takes energy to lift an object off the ground, energy that a car doesn't take. There's reasons why most of our shipping is by land, not air; because it's a lot cheaper to load it on a train or truck than a plane.
Besides the cost issue, a car that stops working rolls on, usually letting you stop someplace safe. A helicopter that stops working falls several stories. There's no need for airbags in a helicopter, because it's going to be the hitting the ground that kills you, and there's nothing you can do about that. Even without roads, in most of the US we'd still travel by train or automobile, because helicopters are dangerous and inefficent.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is certain, if invaders bomb/kill all your innocent family including your 7 years old daughter whose birthday you celebrated yesterday, would you die to avenge them?
Not casually. Vengence is a dish best served cold, and there are much more efficent things given time then just strap a bomb on my chest.
By the first time the American public learned about Atomic weapons, the die was already cast.
We had created two nukes and used them. We didn't have to build more. But the American people elected JFK in part because he tolds us that we needed to build more nukes to achieve parity with the Soviet Union. We elected Eisenhower who was building more nukes. If the American public hadn't wanted nukes, they had more than enough opportunity to tell their presidents and congressmen that.
Not that America is alone in this; India, the UK, France and Israel are other democratic nations that chose to join the nuclear club, even knowing what they were capable of. Even after widespread knowledge of their nuclear programs, none of those nations has voted to dismantle their nukes.
Personally, I believe that we should make a very public treat to go nuclear if another terrorist attack happens to us. We can deliberately vague about our target, only specify that millions of Muslims will die a horrible death and they will have no one to blame but Al Queida, since they knew the price the Muslim world would pay.
So it's all right if Britian nukes Vatican City, and they will have no one to blame but the IRA, since they knew the price the Catholic world would pay?
Turning Iran into a smoking crater would take care of their nuke program and send a powerfull message to Syria, et al.
Yes; the fact that you're a violent sociopath who won't hesitate to kill hundreds of millions of people. To which every major country in the world would have no other option but to gang up to stop.
The mass murder of innocents is never acceptable. And when you start killing, you've got a lot of killing ahead of you, because even those who aren't in your current kill-zone and aren't willing to get involved for justice, might get involved so they don't have to worry about you getting pissed off at them.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Martin Luther King said. And your plan doesn't even come close to reaching the civility of an eye for an eye.
Learn to write safe C and make sure your algorithms are sound and healthy.
You know what they said when they came out with Fortran (for general programming) and later C (for systems programming). "Learn to write safe assembly and make sure your algorithms are sound and healthy, instead of taking the speed hit of using a high-level language." Sigh. How many C exploits is it going to take to learn that this 10 or 15% is worth it?
Wait, so the sentiment around here, as you see it, is that sharing copyrighted materials is only ok if they're older than 28 years old, and I can develop a closed-source version of GNU emacs in 2012?
Sure, why not? Code that old doesn't matter. When Caldera released the ancient Unix code, nobody started building new OSes based on it. Sure, you could create a closed-source version of GNU emacs starting from a version that doesn't support X or Windows or any sort of internationalization or most of the other features a modern emacs has. Woo hoo. Wouldn't it be easier to start with a BSDish emacs-clone, or even from scratch?
The FSF really ought to support the voluntary 28-year copyright limititations, if they can. (The copyright transfer contracts has some limitations on how the FSF can release the code you transfer to them.)
There is no separation between philosophy and science.
Really. Because I see a big difference between "when the QHA-1 gene was removed from the mouse, the resulting mice were 34% (+- 5%) lighter than their unchanged siblings" (which is testable) and "your actions should be driven by the greatest good for the greatest number" (which is not testable.)
[Isaac Newton] wrote more about Biblical prophecy than anything else.
And? Because a scientist writes about Biblical prophecy, or writes Star-Trek fanfics, or writes about the effects of the price of tea in China on the military strength of England doesn't blur the lines between the subjects.
Today's science seeks to quarantine certain ideas and realms of thought from "pure science."
Today's science tries to set up a specific set of rules in order to produce interesting results. One can always say "God did it", but then our only solution to things would be to pray to God. The fact that we didn't just say that everything is the direct hand of God is the reason why we can cure polio and cholera and beriberi and smallpox. We could always say that God created the world 6000 years ago, but then how do we know that he didn't create the world yesterday, or five minutes ago?
Creationists want to liberate the mind and the disciplines of exploration from this materialist/naturalist Iron Curtain.
Bullshit. I've never read of a creationist studying telepathy or Yoga or ghosts or ESP. They don't intend to liberate anything; they intend to push the Biblical, authoritarian viewpoint.
According to Dr. Michael Ruse, who, ironically, had denounced creationism because it was religious, has said that your "real science" does have "metaphysical assumptions.".
Creationists force you to sign that you believe in a specific religion. My "real science" doesn't ask and doesn't care.
Evolution as Religion -- Not Science
You can't have evolution and creationism as science and as not science. You're trying to play both sides. If evolution is not science, then neither is creationism, and has no business being taught in schools.
It may ask that, but that's not what happens. Human nature takes over.
Duh. You can't wave your hands and stop human nature from happening. But you can try. Science makes that attempt; scientists are trained to accept negative results, and science is designed to negate the effects of one biased scientist, or even a whole bunch of them given enough time. If we found rocks with both dinosaurs and hominids in them, science would change.
Again, creationists sign up from the start to swear to one viewpoint. What evidence would change a creationists mind? If there's no evidence that could show that you're wrong, then we go back to the difference between science and philosophy; science is checkable and things that aren't checkable aren't science.
they would admit that fossils have formed around man-made objects within a few decades; fossilization is a rapid process.
I doubt the point, but I have no evidence at hand. However, fossilization is not your big problem. How did Oklahoma get fossils of sea creatures embedded in solid stone? How did all the layers of the Grand Canyon get laid with appropriate fossils? We sure as heck aren't seeing a mile of stone getting laid in a few decades anywhere today; at best something like the Nile lays a few feet of silt a year.
They wouldn't try to invent a new stage of "hominids" based on a solitary jawbone that turned about to be from a known primate species (an ape, IIRC).
Humans aren't perfect. But creationists never noticed that the Piltdown man was a hoax. Evolutionists did, because the other primitive men that they were digging up had modern jaws and primitive skulls, and Piltdown man didn't. That shows the strength of the evolutionary theory, that the hoax was caught because it was inconsistent with the rest of the evidence.
You could bring a Playboy magazine to school and get extra credit for sex ed, but dare to smuggle in a Holy Bible and they'd throw you out on your head for being an "intolerant bigot."
Can you give me an actual example of either happening? I'm real tired of trumpted up fundamentalist strawmen about what goes on in the schools that has no relation to real life. The First Amendment protects your right to have that Bible in school, and the ACLU and just about everyone else recognizes that.
They just want the Biblical viewpoint of creation, which is actually the most popular among Americans, to be included in the teaching curriculum.
But not as literature or mythology; they want it to be included as science. Which it's not; it starts from the Bible and demands specific beliefs. The Institute for Creation Science, the largest Creationist organization I'm familiar with, forces its members to sign a card stating their belief that Jesus is the Son of God. Real science doesn't force its members to declare for any religious beliefs; it merely asks that they engage in a search for truth as shown through the natural world.
BTW, it's not the most popular. Belief that the world has existed for billions and billions of years and some form of evolution has happened over that time (entirely natural or partially god driven) is more common then the belief that the world is several thousand years old and was pretty much created as is.
Christians want daily prayer sessions to be allowed if they are initiated and run by the students.
Student-led have a bad habit of being bogus. In one high school, they decided to have the student council vote on whether or not to have a prayer at graduation. They voted against. They were told to go back and vote again.
In any case, what gives you the right to force a high school student to be silently complict with a religious activity they disagree with, or risk being alientated from their fellow students? I have lived in schools where almost everyone was Christian, where Christian t-shirts and messages and discussions surround me. In every state in the nation, you have the right to gather around and pray before school. If the majority of the students want to pray, they can right now. You just want to compell everyone in the school to join in.
If the students voted for pray, and voted to pray to Confucious or Buddha or Satan, what would you do? Would you let this stand? If you were in Japan or Thailand, would you be happy with your children joining in a Buddhist or Shintoist prayer everyday?
(especially Christian, which was the focus of both the Danbury Baptist letter and today's critics)
Duh. It is the biggest religion, and the only one with the force to pressure its way into the schools. Of course, the author of the Danbury Baptist letter wasn't a Christian, nor did he agree with many of the things Christians believe in.
i went to a 50's pop culture exhibit here in calgary a couple of years ago and they had an entire section of banned media from that period in canada.
I've looked at a couple books that were "privately printed for mature readers" to avoid the censors, one from 1927 and one from 1955. The earlier one, a book of Chinese love stories, graphically described two characters as going at it "like phoenix and dragon." The later one, "French and Oriental Love in a Harem", pointedly stayed out of the bedroom, and had nothing nearly that explicit. The standards have clearly changed in that time.
call for some kind of nondemocratic/nonfree society
How undemocratic. If we find some better way of getting people to govern us then asking a bunch of relatively uninformed people to choose between two professional politicians who have the millions to actually run, Germany would ban the very discussion of the concept? The greatest thing about democracy is that if we do find a freer, better way, we will be able to transition peacefully to it.
More to the point, however, is her recourse. If she truly wanted to make him pay for doing what he did, she could have reported him to the local police. A video of a 13-year-old girl masturbating is child pornography anywhere in the U.S., and by putting the video up on a P2P network, he's guilty of distribution, which is a felony offense.
Um, she's guilty of distribution, too. By reporting him she would have been reporting herself.
I think that shows what/. shows - the Linux community is hostile to Java. The claim was that there was no free software in java - that has been utterly refuted.
I think it's caused by three things. One, that both RedHat and Debian care about really free software, software that doesn't depend on non-free software, and Java doesn't have much of that. Two, all the old mature software--GCC, libc, Linux, emacs--predates Java. Three, and this is less obvious and more argumentative, there's a big difference between the software in Sourceforge and Freshmeat and software that someone actually cares to package for a Linux distribution. There's not a whole lot of important software in Java, IMO, which may be due in part to the fact that important software takes a while to mature.
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It is very trivial to script a properly built GUI. [...]
How? Why? From HCI and study of disability access we know that every action possible in a GUI should be performable with out a mouse. On Microsoft Certified Software this usually means everything has a contextually unique hotkey.
Great, so now we've got a script that's not portable to people using other locales.
it may not be different enough from an earlier song called "Good Morning to All", whose U.S. copyright has already expired, to be considered a distinct work worthy of a separate copyright.
If you want to play legal theory, fine, go for it. But Time Warner enforces its copyright on Happy Birthday on a regular basis for good money, and no one has ever effectively challenged it. For all intents and purposes, unless you've got decent money for a court case, it's copyrighted.
Copyrights hinder things from becoming 'common' in our culture, and life becomes bland. Imagine if noone knew the words to 'happy birthday' or common Christmas carols...
What's your point? "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, and that hasn't hurt it.
Why should the family / estate of the artist get protection above and beyond what the family / estate of the factory worker gets?
For one example, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs knowing he was dying, in the hope it would leave something for family monetarily.
Democracy worked fairly well when the vote was restricted to the competent, but those days are long gone.
You mean like the days when thousands of innocent, civilized, people were forced from their homes so their churches could been turned into beer halls? Yes, the Trail of Tears (i.e. the eviction of the Cherokee) was a great success of democracy.
It is precisely this sort of "we know best for everyone" thinking that starts wars. Your country is your business, and other peoples countries are their businesses respectively.
The extreme of that is when we tolerate genocide because it's their nation. We're all human, and it's not irrational to think that one code of ethics is best for all of us. Loud transcultural debates and arguments are good for helping to discover that optimal code of ethics.
They are showing true respect for Chinese society and sensitivities, which is precisely the way that all humans should interact with each other.
So you're not showing true respect for Chinese society and sensitivities, which say that all humans should be socialized according to Marxist norms. Your concept that what we consider evil in our culture should be tolerated in others is alien and hostile to many cultures, and your opinion that that's how they should act is itself not acting the way you think they should act.
A better question is why is a thirty year old work not in the public domain? Let me answer that, because this aspect of the government is owned by the entertainment industry.
Or because authors got really pissed off when publishers would starting printing their early books and they wouldn't see a cent for them, especially if they got screwed with in the process.
We did not splurge on the Internet. Nope... For once, something was done (mostly) right -- with little money and little government intrusion.
Ever heard of ARPANet?
Even with that, saying "the government" built most of the roads is obscuring the issue. Every city, every state voted as a community to build roads. If they had somehow been stopped from doing so, it would have been done privately and through semi-governmental groups.
Yes, the modern flying apparata are not too user-friendly.
I'm not talking about user-friendly. I'm talking about energy-efficent.
A good helicopter would not stop working, just like modern brakes do not stop braking
You're comparing apples and oranges. Brakes are just one small part of a car. A helicopter would need the engine running to stay in the air. Car engines run out of gas, or overheat or stop working for a myraid of reasons every day. Very rarely is that a life or death situation; you just pull over to the side of the road. A helicopter would fall to the ground; any engine failure would be a life or death situation.
See WWI,WWII And Vietnam conflict.
See what? In WWI, there wasn't mass civilian killings; but there were a lot of them made up for propoganda value. In WWII, the Germans paid dearly for their actions against civilians, starting with losing the war against Britain because they targeted London instead of military targets, and extended on to continuing issues with the Holocaust. Dresden is still high on the propaganda value.
What Vietnam teaches us is that if you don't have a clear military target, wars are a pain in the ass.
As for the Japanese bombings, it does indeed raise questions about the generality of the rule. But Japan was a united government that could stop the war at its choice. It worked by sending a clear message to those who controlled the power to stop the attacks. Iran doesn't control Al-Quedid. No government does.
It doesn't matter who said it, becasue it's out of context and they clearly didn't understand what it meant.
It's about reparation.
Not unless we're robots, and can just plug that eye into our empty eye socket. Reparation would have been "a donkey for a donkey". According to a Baptist preacher I once talked to, it's about limiting the amount of vengence.
not all cultures share your beliefs.
He said "would you do it? I would." So we're obviously talking about my culture and his, not the culture of the bombers. Maybe you think your life worth so little as a few innocent lives and hitting the news for one day, in a tit for tat that could go on forever, but I would want to do something that people couldn't just shrug off as just another attack.
A majority, no matter how strong, is by no means representative of an entire society.
Of course it is. One of the definitions of "representative" is "typical of a class".
Without it, we could well have had usable and affordable little helicopters by now, for example.
And look at our splurging on the Internet. Without it, we could have direct brain to brain connects.
It takes energy to lift an object off the ground, energy that a car doesn't take. There's reasons why most of our shipping is by land, not air; because it's a lot cheaper to load it on a train or truck than a plane.
Besides the cost issue, a car that stops working rolls on, usually letting you stop someplace safe. A helicopter that stops working falls several stories. There's no need for airbags in a helicopter, because it's going to be the hitting the ground that kills you, and there's nothing you can do about that. Even without roads, in most of the US we'd still travel by train or automobile, because helicopters are dangerous and inefficent.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is certain, if invaders bomb/kill all your innocent family including your 7 years old daughter whose birthday you celebrated yesterday, would you die to avenge them?
Not casually. Vengence is a dish best served cold, and there are much more efficent things given time then just strap a bomb on my chest.
By the first time the American public learned about Atomic weapons, the die was already cast.
We had created two nukes and used them. We didn't have to build more. But the American people elected JFK in part because he tolds us that we needed to build more nukes to achieve parity with the Soviet Union. We elected Eisenhower who was building more nukes. If the American public hadn't wanted nukes, they had more than enough opportunity to tell their presidents and congressmen that.
Not that America is alone in this; India, the UK, France and Israel are other democratic nations that chose to join the nuclear club, even knowing what they were capable of. Even after widespread knowledge of their nuclear programs, none of those nations has voted to dismantle their nukes.
Personally, I believe that we should make a very public treat to go nuclear if another terrorist attack happens to us. We can deliberately vague about our target, only specify that millions of Muslims will die a horrible death and they will have no one to blame but Al Queida, since they knew the price the Muslim world would pay.
So it's all right if Britian nukes Vatican City, and they will have no one to blame but the IRA, since they knew the price the Catholic world would pay?
Turning Iran into a smoking crater would take care of their nuke program and send a powerfull message to Syria, et al.
Yes; the fact that you're a violent sociopath who won't hesitate to kill hundreds of millions of people. To which every major country in the world would have no other option but to gang up to stop.
The mass murder of innocents is never acceptable. And when you start killing, you've got a lot of killing ahead of you, because even those who aren't in your current kill-zone and aren't willing to get involved for justice, might get involved so they don't have to worry about you getting pissed off at them.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Martin Luther King said. And your plan doesn't even come close to reaching the civility of an eye for an eye.
Learn to write safe C and make sure your algorithms are sound and healthy.
You know what they said when they came out with Fortran (for general programming) and later C (for systems programming). "Learn to write safe assembly and make sure your algorithms are sound and healthy, instead of taking the speed hit of using a high-level language." Sigh. How many C exploits is it going to take to learn that this 10 or 15% is worth it?
Wait, so the sentiment around here, as you see it, is that sharing copyrighted materials is only ok if they're older than 28 years old, and I can develop a closed-source version of GNU emacs in 2012?
Sure, why not? Code that old doesn't matter. When Caldera released the ancient Unix code, nobody started building new OSes based on it. Sure, you could create a closed-source version of GNU emacs starting from a version that doesn't support X or Windows or any sort of internationalization or most of the other features a modern emacs has. Woo hoo. Wouldn't it be easier to start with a BSDish emacs-clone, or even from scratch?
The FSF really ought to support the voluntary 28-year copyright limititations, if they can. (The copyright transfer contracts has some limitations on how the FSF can release the code you transfer to them.)
There is no separation between philosophy and science.
Really. Because I see a big difference between "when the QHA-1 gene was removed from the mouse, the resulting mice were 34% (+- 5%) lighter than their unchanged siblings" (which is testable) and "your actions should be driven by the greatest good for the greatest number" (which is not testable.)
[Isaac Newton] wrote more about Biblical prophecy than anything else.
And? Because a scientist writes about Biblical prophecy, or writes Star-Trek fanfics, or writes about the effects of the price of tea in China on the military strength of England doesn't blur the lines between the subjects.
Today's science seeks to quarantine certain ideas and realms of thought from "pure science."
Today's science tries to set up a specific set of rules in order to produce interesting results. One can always say "God did it", but then our only solution to things would be to pray to God. The fact that we didn't just say that everything is the direct hand of God is the reason why we can cure polio and cholera and beriberi and smallpox. We could always say that God created the world 6000 years ago, but then how do we know that he didn't create the world yesterday, or five minutes ago?
Creationists want to liberate the mind and the disciplines of exploration from this materialist/naturalist Iron Curtain.
Bullshit. I've never read of a creationist studying telepathy or Yoga or ghosts or ESP. They don't intend to liberate anything; they intend to push the Biblical, authoritarian viewpoint.
According to Dr. Michael Ruse, who, ironically, had denounced creationism because it was religious, has said that your "real science" does have "metaphysical assumptions.".
Creationists force you to sign that you believe in a specific religion. My "real science" doesn't ask and doesn't care.
Evolution as Religion -- Not Science
You can't have evolution and creationism as science and as not science. You're trying to play both sides. If evolution is not science, then neither is creationism, and has no business being taught in schools.
It may ask that, but that's not what happens. Human nature takes over.
Duh. You can't wave your hands and stop human nature from happening. But you can try. Science makes that attempt; scientists are trained to accept negative results, and science is designed to negate the effects of one biased scientist, or even a whole bunch of them given enough time. If we found rocks with both dinosaurs and hominids in them, science would change.
Again, creationists sign up from the start to swear to one viewpoint. What evidence would change a creationists mind? If there's no evidence that could show that you're wrong, then we go back to the difference between science and philosophy; science is checkable and things that aren't checkable aren't science.
they would admit that fossils have formed around man-made objects within a few decades; fossilization is a rapid process.
I doubt the point, but I have no evidence at hand. However, fossilization is not your big problem. How did Oklahoma get fossils of sea creatures embedded in solid stone? How did all the layers of the Grand Canyon get laid with appropriate fossils? We sure as heck aren't seeing a mile of stone getting laid in a few decades anywhere today; at best something like the Nile lays a few feet of silt a year.
They wouldn't try to invent a new stage of "hominids" based on a solitary jawbone that turned about to be from a known primate species (an ape, IIRC).
Humans aren't perfect. But creationists never noticed that the Piltdown man was a hoax. Evolutionists did, because the other primitive men that they were digging up had modern jaws and primitive skulls, and Piltdown man didn't. That shows the strength of the evolutionary theory, that the hoax was caught because it was inconsistent with the rest of the evidence.
You could bring a Playboy magazine to school and get extra credit for sex ed, but dare to smuggle in a Holy Bible and they'd throw you out on your head for being an "intolerant bigot."
Can you give me an actual example of either happening? I'm real tired of trumpted up fundamentalist strawmen about what goes on in the schools that has no relation to real life. The First Amendment protects your right to have that Bible in school, and the ACLU and just about everyone else recognizes that.
They just want the Biblical viewpoint of creation, which is actually the most popular among Americans, to be included in the teaching curriculum.
But not as literature or mythology; they want it to be included as science. Which it's not; it starts from the Bible and demands specific beliefs. The Institute for Creation Science, the largest Creationist organization I'm familiar with, forces its members to sign a card stating their belief that Jesus is the Son of God. Real science doesn't force its members to declare for any religious beliefs; it merely asks that they engage in a search for truth as shown through the natural world.
BTW, it's not the most popular. Belief that the world has existed for billions and billions of years and some form of evolution has happened over that time (entirely natural or partially god driven) is more common then the belief that the world is several thousand years old and was pretty much created as is.
Christians want daily prayer sessions to be allowed if they are initiated and run by the students.
Student-led have a bad habit of being bogus. In one high school, they decided to have the student council vote on whether or not to have a prayer at graduation. They voted against. They were told to go back and vote again.
In any case, what gives you the right to force a high school student to be silently complict with a religious activity they disagree with, or risk being alientated from their fellow students? I have lived in schools where almost everyone was Christian, where Christian t-shirts and messages and discussions surround me. In every state in the nation, you have the right to gather around and pray before school. If the majority of the students want to pray, they can right now. You just want to compell everyone in the school to join in.
If the students voted for pray, and voted to pray to Confucious or Buddha or Satan, what would you do? Would you let this stand? If you were in Japan or Thailand, would you be happy with your children joining in a Buddhist or Shintoist prayer everyday?
(especially Christian, which was the focus of both the Danbury Baptist letter and today's critics)
Duh. It is the biggest religion, and the only one with the force to pressure its way into the schools. Of course, the author of the Danbury Baptist letter wasn't a Christian, nor did he agree with many of the things Christians believe in.
i went to a 50's pop culture exhibit here in calgary a couple of years ago and they had an entire section of banned media from that period in canada.
I've looked at a couple books that were "privately printed for mature readers" to avoid the censors, one from 1927 and one from 1955. The earlier one, a book of Chinese love stories, graphically described two characters as going at it "like phoenix and dragon." The later one, "French and Oriental Love in a Harem", pointedly stayed out of the bedroom, and had nothing nearly that explicit. The standards have clearly changed in that time.
call for some kind of nondemocratic/nonfree society
How undemocratic. If we find some better way of getting people to govern us then asking a bunch of relatively uninformed people to choose between two professional politicians who have the millions to actually run, Germany would ban the very discussion of the concept? The greatest thing about democracy is that if we do find a freer, better way, we will be able to transition peacefully to it.
More to the point, however, is her recourse. If she truly wanted to make him pay for doing what he did, she could have reported him to the local police. A video of a 13-year-old girl masturbating is child pornography anywhere in the U.S., and by putting the video up on a P2P network, he's guilty of distribution, which is a felony offense.
Um, she's guilty of distribution, too. By reporting him she would have been reporting herself.
I think that shows what /. shows - the Linux community is hostile to Java. The claim was that there was no free software in java - that has been utterly refuted.
I think it's caused by three things. One, that both RedHat and Debian care about really free software, software that doesn't depend on non-free software, and Java doesn't have much of that. Two, all the old mature software--GCC, libc, Linux, emacs--predates Java. Three, and this is less obvious and more argumentative, there's a big difference between the software in Sourceforge and Freshmeat and software that someone actually cares to package for a Linux distribution. There's not a whole lot of important software in Java, IMO, which may be due in part to the fact that important software takes a while to mature.
Imagine that huh? The most primitive people around actually give their kids choice of their beliefs.
Or alternately, they keep thier perfect society by dumping their malcontents and mentally ill on us.