Christians have been spreading the lie that the USA was founded in christianity.
Prove it's a lie. I've given one of many references that it is not.
No, actually, you've given a reference that the founders of the US were Christian, not that they founded a Christian nation. The Treaty of Tripoli, unanamously approved by the U.S. Senate June 7, 1797, says that this is not a Christian nation. See grondu's post.
No state has a law prohibiting anyone from reciting the pledge voluntarily, whenever they want to.
Despite what the all-knowing michael says, evidently after 0 minutes of research, there ARE LAWS AGAINST VOLUNTARY PRAYER.
Think C, not Basic; at least the first 6 letters of a word are significant, so "prayer" != "pledge".
In a public school, I cannot lead a group prayer, even voluntarily.
Yes, you can. If you want to lead your table in grace at lunch, it's your right - your freedom of expression - to do so. You may not get up and lead a prayer at any time that you couldn't ordinarily get up and lead a lecture or give your opinion on the school lunches, but that's to avoid government intanglement with religion.
"Voluntary" prayer, where the government says "we shall pray now" is not legal. Voluntary prayer, at your lunch table or quietly before a test, is legal.
Pledging allegiance was voluntary when I went, thirty years ago.
And my sister, who was in school a couple years, was stunned to find it was voluntary, because students who didn't choose to stand were forced to. (Clark County School District, NV. And yes, you have the right not to stand for the pledge, too.)
The founders absolutely founded this country under God
Jefferson also disagreed the idea that we should soley rely on our ancestors; he believed that people actually learned things through the ages and could apply that new found wisdom to his life.
It is freedom OF religion not freedom FROM religion.
Most people who espouse this are happy not being free from religion, so long as the religion is theres. Let Buddhist prayers, or prayers to Diana be heard in a school, most of those people would be having a fit and want the teacher who let it happen be fired.
The provision was only to prevent the government from creating a state controlled religion not to separate religion from government.
Not just state-controlled; Jefferson went to the Virginia State Assembly to stop the funding of religion. And if it were merely to prevent a state controlled religion, there are much better phrasings, some of which were considered and rejected. (I believe the current phrasing was chosen by compromise; it's vague enough that most everyone could agree with it.)
America was formed on Christian principles, not Buddhist principles.
America was formed based on geological principles. I'm not aware of anyone that believes that the continent postdates Jesus.
At the time the consitutition of USA was written, it was part of the constitution that the black man was a slave, and no one could interfere with him being brought over from Africa as such. There were no protection of basic rights, and even the later addition of the First Amendment didn't prevent the Sedition Act from being passed and people being arrested for bad mouthing the president. Obviously some principles have changed.
If you want to talk about the prinicples of the people, the majority of the people living in what is now the US were not Christian, they were Indian, with a variety of faiths. The ancestors of the current inhabitants of the US held many beliefs, including just about any held in the world. The large black population was generally not Christian, but I guess, as above, they don't count, either then or now. Interestingly enough, your white New England Christian population would have been attacked by their Puritan ancestors for terrible laxness; imagine letting an adulterer live!
In other words, "inflection makes [word order] technically superfluous".
Inflection also means "A slide, modulation, or accent of the voice". Since you said that you thought it was the same in English as Esperanto, that is the definition I thought you were using.
Esperanto also has a "normal" way of saying things, in the sense that people look at you funny if you say stuff the other way around all the time.
Weirdly enough, when you're speaking a language that's spoken by almost all non-native speakers, people don't tend to look at others as if they've "grown a second head" for using grammatical expressions.
Why not spend that time learning something else that would be infinitely more interesting?
So you aren't interested in languages. But that is indeed an interest of many geeks, so the other things aren't infinitely more interesting.
Hell, learn to read an ancient language such as Latin so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written.
You could learn Esperanto so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written, too. Part of the point of Esperanto is that learning Latin is much more complex then learning Esperanto. You won't be able to read anything in Latin by the time that you would be nearly fluent in Esperanto.
In other words, learn something that helps you grow as a person.
Why does learning the piano make you grow as a person and learning Esperanto not? Learning the piano, for most people, isn't a skill they will ever use. It's as much mental masturbation as learning Esperanto, except in that you can actually use Esperanto without being excellent at it.
I'll bet it's the same in Esperanto: there is a conventional word order, but inflection makes it technically superfluous
I take it you've never studied Esperanto, or Latin or any other language without a conventional word order, at all? If you mark cases, like Esperanto and Latin do, then there's no need for a conventional word order. In Esperanto, accusative case is marked with an n; i.e. the cat pet the dog-n and the dog-n pet the cat mean the same thing, because the n tells you who's doing what to whom.
I think that no matter how small or efficent your reader is, it still won't be the same thing as paper. Electronic paper? Sounds like a good idea, but how do you turn the page?
I think that no matter how small or efficent your paper is, it still won't be the same thing as clay tablets.
Esperanto is known to amateur linguists as a "conlang" (constructed language), a class that includes everything from Klingon to Elvish. There used to be a conlang fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had invented a new conlang, it was a combination of Japanese and Maltese as if it would be spoken by a dinosaur with enormous nasal cavities. I kid you not. And these people expect to be taken seriously?
There used to be a programming fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had a webserver runing on a Commodore-64. I kid you not. And computer programmers expect to be taken seriously?
Yes, arbitrary, unless you want to define human behavior as intelligence and computer as computation, which begs the question. Arguably, humans use the exact same algorithms computers do, except for humans have excellent pattern matching code and lousy deep search code, and computers are the other way around.
This guy has a very interesting write up about chess and probability. Worth a read.
Not really.
It may even be that chess is a game that can always be won by perfect play, like tic-tac-toe. We wouldn't know that, but let's assume for a moment that chess is a little bit more complex, and does not have a perfect play strategy.
Tic-tac-toe can't always be won by perfect play; it can either be won or drawn by perfect play. Basic game theory says that in any finite two player game that's zero-sum (if one player wins the other loses) and both players know every move that's been made (i.e. not rock-paper-sissors or Stratego) (a group of games that includes chess), one player has a strategy that guarentees he won't lose. So chess has what he calls a "perfect play strategy."
This is the first logical mistake. (He also seems to be begging the question about the nature of free will, too, but that all has already been severed from anything having to do with chess.)
Me bit confused here, arent file systems which come new(like ext3 etc) supposed to be better than the older ones!?
Ext3 is a journalling filesystem. The primary importance for Ext3 is that it not lose data and not require a lengthy fsck after an improper shutdown. Needless to say, if those are your goals, then you're going to be slower then a well-designed filesystem like Ext2 that assumes the system won't suddenly fail.
When will they get it through their heads that the construction of the bill won't every solve counterfeiting?
When will they get it through their heads that medicine won't ever solve death, and cops won't ever solve crime? They understand that they can't ever solve the problem, but they can reduce it.
Anything they can make, others can make too. Last time, the Russian mafia had excellent fakes out almost before most people in the US had the new bills in their pockets!
Excellent by what standard? In any case, it is terribly important that I can't forge money on my DeskJet. It is quite important that the street gangs can't forge money. At the level of the Russian mob, it's more important that it's not perfect and that it's not cheap and easy.
The only practical solution is to surveil the money (not the people).
Right. Instead a few hundred million dollars being spent every five years to redesign the bill and inform the public of new features, we spend billions to moniter the flow of every dollar in the US; and, of course, it's just going to be used to moniter counterfeiting (and then bank robberies, and since we know what money was in the safe, other robberies, and gee, let's trace the bills that are going into the adult bookstore, one of which was used in change for a 1978 Chavez the governer bought . ..).
The difference between computation and intelligence is obvious.
The difference between computation and coming up with a proof of Fermat's last theorem or a paper on 20th century Japan and their reaction to Shakespeare is obvious. The difference between "computation" on a small, limited, rule-bound problem field and "intelligence" on the same field is arbitrary.
What's the difference? Why is the ability to store large amounts of state in mind and do various forms of complex pattern matching intelligence, whereas the ability to look at many positions and calculate their value not?
Why? Is it not conceivable that computers may perhaps be weaker in some THING than humans?
Computers suck at a lot of things, like translation. But they don't suck at brute-force in-depth analysis of mathematical problems, which happens to work fairly well with chess. Deep Blue was good enough to outplay the best chess player in the world a few years ago, While none of the competitions between computers and people in the past few years have been with such strong hardware, they have managed to pull draws against the best players in the world. Throw a supercomputer against the problem, and odds are any human could be beat today at chess; in a few years, given Moore's law, off the shelf hardware could do it. Humans don't have Moore's law working for them; at best, they improve over generations, not months.
We've done a few case studies on number of defects per line of code when performing code audits. C and C++ programs have averaged 4-5 security-critical defects per thousand lines of code. Java programs still average 1-2 security-critical defect per thousand lines.
[...]
At the end of the day, if you're going to be diligent, then security can be reduced to a fairly minor consideration in programming language choice.
You can cut security-critical defects by 50%, and that's a minor consideration?!
Take a look at this somewhat related article. It looks almost like its a response to reading Slashdot and responding with a troll.
It's a series of non-sequitors. It lumps hackers, crackers, warez people and P2P downloaders in one group and paints them all the same, calling them communists and terrorists. The simple fact of the matter is most P2P downloaders and pretty much all warez people use Windows. Without that lumping, his argument falls to pieces.
Try this line:
(and sorry, but these are your spawn justifying themselves with your ideology)
It could be used to paint Christians as doctor murderers or capitalists as defrauders (ala Enron).
A mail client that claims to be more user friendly can also save a file and run it automatically as well. There just hasn't been a popular one in use yet.
Right, because that's been shown to be a stupid idea.
"Even worse, the collection of files on a Windows system - the operating system, the applications, and the user data - can't be kept apart from each other."
[...] Besides for some accepted practices, most applications dump their libraries in/usr/lib and executables in/usr/bin, but without any organization.
But the user data and and applications are kept seperate from each other.
This is true in the present, and developers/distributors are compelled to do so, to make their distribution more attractive as they try to penetrate the home market. Will this continue?
It's one of the big selling points of Linux; who really wants to screw it up?
A lot still needs to be done in terms of Linux security before it can be said that in an equivalent environment and set of demographics, Linux is more secure than Windows.
Not really. All your arguments above say "they could". Linux has a strong root/user seperation; very few programs need to be setuid root. Linux has a strong multiuser seperation that Windows doesn't. Linux doesn't have the bad default behaviors that Windows does.
There's no reason to write GNU make files when there's a perfectly reasonable and standard make format.
Really. If that's so, then maybe you can explain why FreeBSD's make is massively extended from that same standard, incompatibily with GNU make, but in the same fashions?
This is the worst part about the American legal system, but was designed to be the best part- the judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law. This is what justice sometimes requires.
That's, at best, a problem that's hard to eradicate from a human-run system. If the law says the only legal sexual position is missionary, you can move or try and get the law changed. If a judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law, you could find yourself in jail for having the woman on top without having any forewarning that it might get you in legal trouble. The rule of law may be sometimes arbitrary and cold, but it beats the heck out of every Joe (or even every Judge Joe) exacting his or her own brand of justice according to his or her own rules.
if it could redefine a procedure in memory, used by more trusted stacks, you could end up screwed anyway.
Then you've done your sandboxing wrong. Any program with C linkage can have a sqrt function, but it won't overwrite the libc sqrt function. Why is that so increadibly hard with hypercard?
Barr was criticised for quoting the FAQ out of context (an obviously tongue-in-cheek comment was quoted as some sort of flame of end-users)
In the mplayer documentation, there's a section named users_against_developers.html. In it, Joe Barr is personally attacked. I would never bother filing a bug report on mplayer until I had compiled mplayer by hand and had a 10k example movie file that I had checked against the standards, not with that level of professionalism on the other end.
Slashdot Mirror
Christians have been spreading the lie that the USA was founded in christianity.
Prove it's a lie. I've given one of many references that it is not.
No, actually, you've given a reference that the founders of the US were Christian, not that they founded a Christian nation. The Treaty of Tripoli, unanamously approved by the U.S. Senate June 7, 1797, says that this is not a Christian nation. See grondu's post.
No state has a law prohibiting anyone from reciting the pledge voluntarily, whenever they want to.
Despite what the all-knowing michael says, evidently after 0 minutes of research, there ARE LAWS AGAINST VOLUNTARY PRAYER.
Think C, not Basic; at least the first 6 letters of a word are significant, so "prayer" != "pledge".
In a public school, I cannot lead a group prayer, even voluntarily.
Yes, you can. If you want to lead your table in grace at lunch, it's your right - your freedom of expression - to do so. You may not get up and lead a prayer at any time that you couldn't ordinarily get up and lead a lecture or give your opinion on the school lunches, but that's to avoid government intanglement with religion.
"Voluntary" prayer, where the government says "we shall pray now" is not legal. Voluntary prayer, at your lunch table or quietly before a test, is legal.
Pledging allegiance was voluntary when I went, thirty years ago.
And my sister, who was in school a couple years, was stunned to find it was voluntary, because students who didn't choose to stand were forced to. (Clark County School District, NV. And yes, you have the right not to stand for the pledge, too.)
The founders absolutely founded this country under God
Jefferson also disagreed the idea that we should soley rely on our ancestors; he believed that people actually learned things through the ages and could apply that new found wisdom to his life.
It is freedom OF religion not freedom FROM religion.
Most people who espouse this are happy not being free from religion, so long as the religion is theres. Let Buddhist prayers, or prayers to Diana be heard in a school, most of those people would be having a fit and want the teacher who let it happen be fired.
The provision was only to prevent the government from creating a state controlled religion not to separate religion from government.
Not just state-controlled; Jefferson went to the Virginia State Assembly to stop the funding of religion. And if it were merely to prevent a state controlled religion, there are much better phrasings, some of which were considered and rejected. (I believe the current phrasing was chosen by compromise; it's vague enough that most everyone could agree with it.)
America was formed on Christian principles, not Buddhist principles.
America was formed based on geological principles. I'm not aware of anyone that believes that the continent postdates Jesus.
At the time the consitutition of USA was written, it was part of the constitution that the black man was a slave, and no one could interfere with him being brought over from Africa as such. There were no protection of basic rights, and even the later addition of the First Amendment didn't prevent the Sedition Act from being passed and people being arrested for bad mouthing the president. Obviously some principles have changed.
If you want to talk about the prinicples of the people, the majority of the people living in what is now the US were not Christian, they were Indian, with a variety of faiths. The ancestors of the current inhabitants of the US held many beliefs, including just about any held in the world. The large black population was generally not Christian, but I guess, as above, they don't count, either then or now. Interestingly enough, your white New England Christian population would have been attacked by their Puritan ancestors for terrible laxness; imagine letting an adulterer live!
In other words, "inflection makes [word order] technically superfluous".
Inflection also means "A slide, modulation, or accent of the voice". Since you said that you thought it was the same in English as Esperanto, that is the definition I thought you were using.
Esperanto also has a "normal" way of saying things, in the sense that people look at you funny if you say stuff the other way around all the time.
Weirdly enough, when you're speaking a language that's spoken by almost all non-native speakers, people don't tend to look at others as if they've "grown a second head" for using grammatical expressions.
Why not spend that time learning something else that would be infinitely more interesting?
So you aren't interested in languages. But that is indeed an interest of many geeks, so the other things aren't infinitely more interesting.
Hell, learn to read an ancient language such as Latin so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written.
You could learn Esperanto so you can read certain literature the way it was originally written, too. Part of the point of Esperanto is that learning Latin is much more complex then learning Esperanto. You won't be able to read anything in Latin by the time that you would be nearly fluent in Esperanto.
In other words, learn something that helps you grow as a person.
Why does learning the piano make you grow as a person and learning Esperanto not? Learning the piano, for most people, isn't a skill they will ever use. It's as much mental masturbation as learning Esperanto, except in that you can actually use Esperanto without being excellent at it.
I'll bet it's the same in Esperanto: there is a conventional word order, but inflection makes it technically superfluous
I take it you've never studied Esperanto, or Latin or any other language without a conventional word order, at all? If you mark cases, like Esperanto and Latin do, then there's no need for a conventional word order. In Esperanto, accusative case is marked with an n; i.e. the cat pet the dog-n and the dog-n pet the cat mean the same thing, because the n tells you who's doing what to whom.
I think that no matter how small or efficent your reader is, it still won't be the same thing as paper. Electronic paper? Sounds like a good idea, but how do you turn the page?
I think that no matter how small or efficent your paper is, it still won't be the same thing as clay tablets.
Esperanto is known to amateur linguists as a "conlang" (constructed language), a class that includes everything from Klingon to Elvish. There used to be a conlang fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had invented a new conlang, it was a combination of Japanese and Maltese as if it would be spoken by a dinosaur with enormous nasal cavities. I kid you not. And these people expect to be taken seriously?
There used to be a programming fool I saw spouting off on the net about how he had a webserver runing on a Commodore-64. I kid you not. And computer programmers expect to be taken seriously?
Arbitrary? Hardly.
Yes, arbitrary, unless you want to define human behavior as intelligence and computer as computation, which begs the question. Arguably, humans use the exact same algorithms computers do, except for humans have excellent pattern matching code and lousy deep search code, and computers are the other way around.
This guy has a very interesting write up about chess and probability. Worth a read.
Not really.
It may even be that chess is a game that can always be won by perfect play, like tic-tac-toe. We wouldn't know that, but let's assume for a moment that chess is a little bit more complex, and does not have a perfect play strategy.
Tic-tac-toe can't always be won by perfect play; it can either be won or drawn by perfect play. Basic game theory says that in any finite two player game that's zero-sum (if one player wins the other loses) and both players know every move that's been made (i.e. not rock-paper-sissors or Stratego) (a group of games that includes chess), one player has a strategy that guarentees he won't lose. So chess has what he calls a "perfect play strategy."
This is the first logical mistake. (He also seems to be begging the question about the nature of free will, too, but that all has already been severed from anything having to do with chess.)
Me bit confused here, arent file systems which come new(like ext3 etc) supposed to be better than the older ones!?
Ext3 is a journalling filesystem. The primary importance for Ext3 is that it not lose data and not require a lengthy fsck after an improper shutdown. Needless to say, if those are your goals, then you're going to be slower then a well-designed filesystem like Ext2 that assumes the system won't suddenly fail.
When will they get it through their heads that the construction of the bill won't every solve counterfeiting?
.).
When will they get it through their heads that medicine won't ever solve death, and cops won't ever solve crime? They understand that they can't ever solve the problem, but they can reduce it.
Anything they can make, others can make too. Last time, the Russian mafia had excellent fakes out almost before most people in the US had the new bills in their pockets!
Excellent by what standard? In any case, it is terribly important that I can't forge money on my DeskJet. It is quite important that the street gangs can't forge money. At the level of the Russian mob, it's more important that it's not perfect and that it's not cheap and easy.
The only practical solution is to surveil the money (not the people).
Right. Instead a few hundred million dollars being spent every five years to redesign the bill and inform the public of new features, we spend billions to moniter the flow of every dollar in the US; and, of course, it's just going to be used to moniter counterfeiting (and then bank robberies, and since we know what money was in the safe, other robberies, and gee, let's trace the bills that are going into the adult bookstore, one of which was used in change for a 1978 Chavez the governer bought . .
Heh, the US is the only place I have seen a drive-through ATM (cashpoint) which had braille on the digits for all those, erm, blind drivers.
Or if a blind person is sitting in the back seat and doesn't want to give his PIN to the driver.
The difference between computation and intelligence is obvious.
The difference between computation and coming up with a proof of Fermat's last theorem or a paper on 20th century Japan and their reaction to Shakespeare is obvious. The difference between "computation" on a small, limited, rule-bound problem field and "intelligence" on the same field is arbitrary.
That's not intelligence, just raw computation.
What's the difference? Why is the ability to store large amounts of state in mind and do various forms of complex pattern matching intelligence, whereas the ability to look at many positions and calculate their value not?
Why? Is it not conceivable that computers may perhaps be weaker in some THING than humans?
Computers suck at a lot of things, like translation. But they don't suck at brute-force in-depth analysis of mathematical problems, which happens to work fairly well with chess. Deep Blue was good enough to outplay the best chess player in the world a few years ago, While none of the competitions between computers and people in the past few years have been with such strong hardware, they have managed to pull draws against the best players in the world. Throw a supercomputer against the problem, and odds are any human could be beat today at chess; in a few years, given Moore's law, off the shelf hardware could do it. Humans don't have Moore's law working for them; at best, they improve over generations, not months.
We've done a few case studies on number of defects per line of code when performing code audits. C and C++ programs have averaged 4-5 security-critical defects per thousand lines of code. Java programs still average 1-2 security-critical defect per thousand lines.
[...]
At the end of the day, if you're going to be diligent, then security can be reduced to a fairly minor consideration in programming language choice.
You can cut security-critical defects by 50%, and that's a minor consideration?!
Take a look at this somewhat related article. It looks almost like its a response to reading Slashdot and responding with a troll.
It's a series of non-sequitors. It lumps hackers, crackers, warez people and P2P downloaders in one group and paints them all the same, calling them communists and terrorists. The simple fact of the matter is most P2P downloaders and pretty much all warez people use Windows. Without that lumping, his argument falls to pieces.
Try this line:
(and sorry, but these are your spawn justifying themselves with your ideology)
It could be used to paint Christians as doctor murderers or capitalists as defrauders (ala Enron).
A mail client that claims to be more user friendly can also save a file and run it automatically as well. There just hasn't been a popular one in use yet.
/usr/lib and executables in /usr/bin, but without any organization.
Right, because that's been shown to be a stupid idea.
"Even worse, the collection of files on a Windows system - the operating system, the applications, and the user data - can't be kept apart from each other."
[...]
Besides for some accepted practices, most applications dump their libraries in
But the user data and and applications are kept seperate from each other.
This is true in the present, and developers/distributors are compelled to do so, to make their distribution more attractive as they try to penetrate the home market. Will this continue?
It's one of the big selling points of Linux; who really wants to screw it up?
A lot still needs to be done in terms of Linux security before it can be said that in an equivalent environment and set of demographics, Linux is more secure than Windows.
Not really. All your arguments above say "they could". Linux has a strong root/user seperation; very few programs need to be setuid root. Linux has a strong multiuser seperation that Windows doesn't. Linux doesn't have the bad default behaviors that Windows does.
There's no reason to write GNU make files when there's a perfectly reasonable and standard make format.
Really. If that's so, then maybe you can explain why FreeBSD's make is massively extended from that same standard, incompatibily with GNU make, but in the same fashions?
This is the worst part about the American legal system, but was designed to be the best part- the judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law. This is what justice sometimes requires.
That's, at best, a problem that's hard to eradicate from a human-run system. If the law says the only legal sexual position is missionary, you can move or try and get the law changed. If a judge can rule contrary to the letter of the law, you could find yourself in jail for having the woman on top without having any forewarning that it might get you in legal trouble. The rule of law may be sometimes arbitrary and cold, but it beats the heck out of every Joe (or even every Judge Joe) exacting his or her own brand of justice according to his or her own rules.
if it could redefine a procedure in memory, used by more trusted stacks, you could end up screwed anyway.
Then you've done your sandboxing wrong. Any program with C linkage can have a sqrt function, but it won't overwrite the libc sqrt function. Why is that so increadibly hard with hypercard?
Barr was criticised for quoting the FAQ out of context (an obviously tongue-in-cheek comment was quoted as some sort of flame of end-users)
In the mplayer documentation, there's a section named users_against_developers.html. In it, Joe Barr is personally attacked. I would never bother filing a bug report on mplayer until I had compiled mplayer by hand and had a 10k example movie file that I had checked against the standards, not with that level of professionalism on the other end.