When it comes to civil dialog, anonymous political posts account for a very, very, VERY small percentage so your argument falls flat on its face right there.
But the same argument applies more generally - there are plenty of cases where people discuss on personal or taboo topics, which they would not want to show up when their employer or family do a Google search...
And yes, someone who runs a blog has every right to disallow anonymous comments, but they also have every right to not adopt this code of conduct, which seems more likely if it has things like disallowing anonymous comments.
Another problem with disallowing anonymous (as in no login required) comments is: who can be bothered to sign up, just to post to some random blog?
Actually, consent is a suitable defense to assault under Scots law, although I'm not sure about England. Believe it or not, this "consent" defense arose as a result of BDSM.
In England, consent is not an allowed defence unless the Judge thinks it is in the public interest. So in practice this means it's okay to beat each other senseless in the name of sport, but the sexuality of consenting adults in private is a no-no, and you can be convicted even if the "victim" doesn't press charges, and stands up in court saying "I wanted this". See the Spanner case - people were sent to prison for this.
Though oddly, there's only ever been this one case where people were found guilty AFAIK, and confusingly there was another case where it was ruled legal. There was the difference that they was married, and IIRC the Judge ruled that the private affairs between married couples were no business of the state.
I mean, creating the perfect infrastructure for a totalistic government by placing cameras and loudspeakers everywhere just doesn't seem right for a presumably liberal government lead by Labour.
I think the Labour Government have long given up any right to being described as "liberal", they've done much more serious things than talking cameras...
What if you got rid of all of the CCTV cameras and doubled the number of police patrolling the streets instead? How would it be different?
I can at least talk back to a policeman - perhaps there are special circumstances he isn't aware of, or perhaps I need help or have a question (e.g., a camera telling the bin is right behind me is all very well, but in practice the bigger problem is that there's never a bin around, and I can't stand there asking a camera for directions to the nearest bin).
I don't know if there's any kind of microphone to allow people to talk back, but if not, it's this one-sidedness that makes a big difference; you've got no chance for interaction, it's just following orders from some faceless guy sitting behind a desk.
(Now there are cases where handicapped members of a species may not be able to do this, but that doesn't mean the rights don't apply; what I mean is that, as a class, a species must have the capability.)
I was going to list the same counter-examples of handicapped people, babies and so on. I'm not convinced this is a good reason - we only give these people rights, because other lifeforms which happen to belong to the same species can recognise rights?
If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights
By the same logic, shouldn't we be penalising people if other members of their species fail to uphold rights (which sadly often happens with humans)?
As for animals not upholding rights - can you show me where animals abduct, enslave and own humans? Don't get me wrong, I think it would be silly say to treat all animals as humans, but I don't think it's true that animals don't "uphold rights", because the rights are to protect against things which animals would never do to humans or other animals in the first place.
Except that Apple controls the hardware they put it on (or at least know what type of hardware people upgrading to their next OS will have) because they supply it. Apple knows exactly much of a resource hog they can make OSX each version. Microsoft doesn't and should be more conservative on flashy GUI effects and focus on efficient programming
Because it's impossible to upgrade OS X on an existing machine?
Microsoft aren't allowed to specify minimum requirements, but Apple are allowed to write bloated code?
Apple really led the way in multimedia in the early 90s. The earliest "multimedia" PCs were pretty pathetic when viewed by a Mac-user who was used to real sound (not beeps) and high-res graphics.
You mean "led the way" as in "better than rubbish PCs", just like all those other platforms led the way also.
if it weren't for the Soundblaster we'd be playing visually stunning games with beeps and parps for sound effects.
I agree that I'm not sure what's so special about Voodoo 3 (I mean, the first Voodoo I could understand...) but there were other platforms with proper sound samples years before 1992.
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
Murder is a criminal case, and evidence would be investigated by the police. It wouldn't be an excuse for the victim's family to search through the suspect's belongings in the hope of turning up evidence.
Copyright infringement is a civil issue, and a 3rd party suing should not give them the right to have access to someone's PC, especially with all the invasion of privacy that that entails.
I hope you realize the irony of your comments. You could have easily made the same point WITHOUT insulting anybody, and your argument would have been that much stronger.
Well, it's certainly true that many if not most Christians are fine on this issue, but it is true that much of the pro-censorship lobby on this issue comes from religious (mainly Christian, perhaps simply because there are more of them) groups. At least, that's certainly what's happening in the UK (e.g., a recent issue involving churches and Muslim leaders calling for simple possession of R18 material, as well as anything unclassified by the BBFC (censor board), to be a criminal offence).
I think it's pretty clear that the OP is well aware that the spacecraft is not beyond the range of influence of the Earth's gravity (which is infinite, after all).
At the same time though, in General Relativity a gravitational field is equivalent to an accelerating frame of reference (or something like that...), so the sum total gravitational effects experienced in the spacecraft's frame of reference is near zero.
It could be argued that "zero gravity" is misleading as it will help perpetuate the common myth that weightlessness is due to being beyond the Earth's gravity, rather than it being cancelled out due to the acceleration, but nonetheless, that's a term used to refer to it, and I think it's clear that the OP wasn't misunderstanding the differences.
I'd question that labelling it as "scientifically inaccurate" constitutes POV, especially when it is backed up only by one person, who is described as a journalist and historian, not a scientist.
They could maybe claim that by the student sending their work over the unencrypted internet they are effectively making it a public domain work
Given how many things are transferred unencrypted, not to mention being available to download, that clearly aren't in the public domain, no that argument isn't going to hold at all.
There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and tell me that that's not faith). There's faith that the vast majority of collected data hasn't been tampered with. There's faith that, on the whole, scientists are conscientious about their work, and do not seek to deceive. There is even faith that no one is holding a gun to the heads of everyone who has ever worked in the field to gather data, and telling them to lie.
The problem is that we are conflating different meanings of "faith". Yes, we can't ever know anything with 100% certainity, but we do have large amounts evidence supporting such beliefs. I presume this is what the grandparent post meant.
OTOH, "faith" in the creationist or religious sense can mean believing something even without any evidence, and this is presumably what the parent you replied to meant.
Trying to suggest that these are both "faith", and therefore that believing in something with strong evidence is no different to believing a made up story with no evidence, is a common creationist tactic, but they are hardly comparable.
Evolutionary is just a theory, not a law, so it is okay to have these revisions.
Laws can be revised too, or known to only be an approximation (e.g., gas laws). In science, contrary to what is commonly assumed, "law" does not mean "proven to be certainly true", a law is a simple expression representing some observed relationship. A theory is something different, and much wider in scope - it's a model which explains how things work.
I agree with your general point, but note that in the UK at least, it does seem to be the law that you can still give consent when drunk (there was a recent case where the Judge emphasised this).
It would be rather bad if you couldn't, because this would basically criminalise adults having sex when drunk - even if afterwards, they still both agreed they wanted to, it would still be illegal because they couldn't consent. Also, it would mean the woman should be guilty if the man is drunk.
But yes, your point still stands - that 10% figure is about people who report rapes, and sadly it's a common myth that if you're drunk then change your mind the next day, it counts as rape. (Also I'd like to see a source for that 10% figure... I remember once seeing a "one in four" claim, which was actually based on people who said they'd had sex then regretted it, or something like that.) So unfortunately it tells us little about the real number.
The worrying thing is that whilst most "rape myths" are condemned, it seems to be a taboo to speak out against these sorts of myths.
Rather, it's about several things that contribute to brawling prowess: average deliverable impulse, average willingness to injure, average willingness to kill, average willingness to flee (which short-circuits the fight-for-your-life aggression). My sense is that women lose on all four counts to men.
On average, though. Let's face it, I'm sure there are plenty here on Slashdot that lose out on all four counts to the "average" man... so by the same reasoning, they should have more to fear (and indeed, plenty of us probably do).
Ever walk to your car in a dark parking lot? When you do, do you give thought to being attacked? I don't, but almost every woman I've asked says she does.
There's a different between how people feel, and the actual risk - these shouldn't be conflated.
And actually yes, I do fear being attacked when out at night, because these things do happen to men (and no, it isn't because they get in bar fights).
Not that it makes it right - it's not a competition. Where there is a common factor though is that it's most likely to be (a minority of) men committing the violence.
I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad.
It isn't, it's made up, see the other responses about this being a reworking of an old anti-Mac troll.
But yes, given the content of this article, it had me fooled at first too. I'm no fan of Vista and I'm happy sticking with XP, but now I'm not sure we can trust any of the bad claims about Vista being thrown about here.
let's assume somebody uses the music player on average for 2 hours every day, then you'd be using about 1/8 of a single AA battery between each recharge, or approximately 10% of your cellphone battery (which has roughly equal mAh to an AA). It's not enough to matter.
The problem is not average use, it's occasions where say, I might be going away for a weekend and have less opportunity to plug it into a socket to recharge, and whilst travelling I might be listening to if for many more hours. A weekend away is just about what my phone can manage (though I guess I do have a 3G one which sucks battery life), and I'm careful not to use mp3 playing on such occasions. On an average day though, it doesn't matter.
Look at it this way, if they simply made the cellphone battery 10% larger to compensate, that would add by far less weight and expense than carrying a second, standalone mp3 device.
Sure, if they did do that, they could make a combined phone/mp3/camera device that also had a combined battery that lasted as long as of all of those things, whilst still being smaller. But they don't.
Wikipedia fails it again: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, Ent, TAS. (The animated series. It had Niven-style Kzin. It's worse than it sounds. Look it up.)
Wikipedia doesn't fail it, I'm pretty sure it mentioned TAS. I chose not to include it because I was only counting non-cartoons and I wasn't sure how "canon" it was. I didn't include the animated Stargate either... but yeah, add them both in if you like.
I bet you $1 Youtube is gone in 10 years, or if not gone, certainly forgotten.
Do you mean YouTube specifically, or are you saying any online video site? I bet YouTube won't be around too, but the OP's point wasn't specific to that particular site.
But he should know everything about computer science, and that would include the kind of math the computer is best at. Not every algorithim you're ever going to need is going to be already in an abstracted dynamic link library. And if you know binary math and boolean algebra, you'll understand how to write a new algorithim in such a way in a higher level language so that the compiler will end up with a very efficient and reusable piece of machine code.
I guess I suck then, as I don't know everything there is to know ever about computer science.
Out of interest, can you give me an example where knowledge of the assembly can allow you to write code to improve the efficiency of the code the compiler outputs? I'm not saying it never happens - but does this happen for all types of programmers, and how often does it occur compared with say writing efficient algorithms in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to civil dialog, anonymous political posts account for a very, very, VERY small percentage so your argument falls flat on its face right there.
But the same argument applies more generally - there are plenty of cases where people discuss on personal or taboo topics, which they would not want to show up when their employer or family do a Google search...
And yes, someone who runs a blog has every right to disallow anonymous comments, but they also have every right to not adopt this code of conduct, which seems more likely if it has things like disallowing anonymous comments.
Another problem with disallowing anonymous (as in no login required) comments is: who can be bothered to sign up, just to post to some random blog?
Actually, consent is a suitable defense to assault under Scots law, although I'm not sure about England. Believe it or not, this "consent" defense arose as a result of BDSM.
In England, consent is not an allowed defence unless the Judge thinks it is in the public interest. So in practice this means it's okay to beat each other senseless in the name of sport, but the sexuality of consenting adults in private is a no-no, and you can be convicted even if the "victim" doesn't press charges, and stands up in court saying "I wanted this". See the Spanner case - people were sent to prison for this.
Though oddly, there's only ever been this one case where people were found guilty AFAIK, and confusingly there was another case where it was ruled legal. There was the difference that they was married, and IIRC the Judge ruled that the private affairs between married couples were no business of the state.
I mean, creating the perfect infrastructure for a totalistic government by placing cameras and loudspeakers everywhere just doesn't seem right for a presumably liberal government lead by Labour.
I think the Labour Government have long given up any right to being described as "liberal", they've done much more serious things than talking cameras...
What if you got rid of all of the CCTV cameras and doubled the number of police patrolling the streets instead? How would it be different?
I can at least talk back to a policeman - perhaps there are special circumstances he isn't aware of, or perhaps I need help or have a question (e.g., a camera telling the bin is right behind me is all very well, but in practice the bigger problem is that there's never a bin around, and I can't stand there asking a camera for directions to the nearest bin).
I don't know if there's any kind of microphone to allow people to talk back, but if not, it's this one-sidedness that makes a big difference; you've got no chance for interaction, it's just following orders from some faceless guy sitting behind a desk.
So clearly we shouldn't give rights to the animals which kill humans and so on.
What about say... bunny rabbits? They seem good, can they have human rights then? What about goldfish?
(Now there are cases where handicapped members of a species may not be able to do this, but that doesn't mean the rights don't apply; what I mean is that, as a class, a species must have the capability.)
I was going to list the same counter-examples of handicapped people, babies and so on. I'm not convinced this is a good reason - we only give these people rights, because other lifeforms which happen to belong to the same species can recognise rights?
If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights
By the same logic, shouldn't we be penalising people if other members of their species fail to uphold rights (which sadly often happens with humans)?
As for animals not upholding rights - can you show me where animals abduct, enslave and own humans? Don't get me wrong, I think it would be silly say to treat all animals as humans, but I don't think it's true that animals don't "uphold rights", because the rights are to protect against things which animals would never do to humans or other animals in the first place.
Except that Apple controls the hardware they put it on (or at least know what type of hardware people upgrading to their next OS will have) because they supply it. Apple knows exactly much of a resource hog they can make OSX each version. Microsoft doesn't and should be more conservative on flashy GUI effects and focus on efficient programming
Because it's impossible to upgrade OS X on an existing machine?
Microsoft aren't allowed to specify minimum requirements, but Apple are allowed to write bloated code?
Okay...
Apple really led the way in multimedia in the early 90s. The earliest "multimedia" PCs were pretty pathetic when viewed by a Mac-user who was used to real sound (not beeps) and high-res graphics.
You mean "led the way" as in "better than rubbish PCs", just like all those other platforms led the way also.
if it weren't for the Soundblaster we'd be playing visually stunning games with beeps and parps for sound effects.
I agree that I'm not sure what's so special about Voodoo 3 (I mean, the first Voodoo I could understand...) but there were other platforms with proper sound samples years before 1992.
Devil's advocate on this one: the license agreement says an Apple-labled computer
;)
And similarly, I'll be fine when I try to install MacOS on a PC with Apple sticker
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
Murder is a criminal case, and evidence would be investigated by the police. It wouldn't be an excuse for the victim's family to search through the suspect's belongings in the hope of turning up evidence.
Copyright infringement is a civil issue, and a 3rd party suing should not give them the right to have access to someone's PC, especially with all the invasion of privacy that that entails.
I hope you realize the irony of your comments. You could have easily made the same point WITHOUT insulting anybody, and your argument would have been that much stronger.
Well, it's certainly true that many if not most Christians are fine on this issue, but it is true that much of the pro-censorship lobby on this issue comes from religious (mainly Christian, perhaps simply because there are more of them) groups. At least, that's certainly what's happening in the UK (e.g., a recent issue involving churches and Muslim leaders calling for simple possession of R18 material, as well as anything unclassified by the BBFC (censor board), to be a criminal offence).
I think it's pretty clear that the OP is well aware that the spacecraft is not beyond the range of influence of the Earth's gravity (which is infinite, after all).
At the same time though, in General Relativity a gravitational field is equivalent to an accelerating frame of reference (or something like that...), so the sum total gravitational effects experienced in the spacecraft's frame of reference is near zero.
It could be argued that "zero gravity" is misleading as it will help perpetuate the common myth that weightlessness is due to being beyond the Earth's gravity, rather than it being cancelled out due to the acceleration, but nonetheless, that's a term used to refer to it, and I think it's clear that the OP wasn't misunderstanding the differences.
I'd question that labelling it as "scientifically inaccurate" constitutes POV, especially when it is backed up only by one person, who is described as a journalist and historian, not a scientist.
They could maybe claim that by the student sending their work over the unencrypted internet they are effectively making it a public domain work
Given how many things are transferred unencrypted, not to mention being available to download, that clearly aren't in the public domain, no that argument isn't going to hold at all.
There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and tell me that that's not faith). There's faith that the vast majority of collected data hasn't been tampered with. There's faith that, on the whole, scientists are conscientious about their work, and do not seek to deceive. There is even faith that no one is holding a gun to the heads of everyone who has ever worked in the field to gather data, and telling them to lie.
The problem is that we are conflating different meanings of "faith". Yes, we can't ever know anything with 100% certainity, but we do have large amounts evidence supporting such beliefs. I presume this is what the grandparent post meant.
OTOH, "faith" in the creationist or religious sense can mean believing something even without any evidence, and this is presumably what the parent you replied to meant.
Trying to suggest that these are both "faith", and therefore that believing in something with strong evidence is no different to believing a made up story with no evidence, is a common creationist tactic, but they are hardly comparable.
Evolutionary is just a theory, not a law, so it is okay to have these revisions.
Laws can be revised too, or known to only be an approximation (e.g., gas laws). In science, contrary to what is commonly assumed, "law" does not mean "proven to be certainly true", a law is a simple expression representing some observed relationship. A theory is something different, and much wider in scope - it's a model which explains how things work.
If it is just a theory
There's your problem right there - no, creationism isn't a theory.
There is still room for other ideas
If by "room for other ideas" you mean that there's science, and then made up stories, then sure.
I agree with your general point, but note that in the UK at least, it does seem to be the law that you can still give consent when drunk (there was a recent case where the Judge emphasised this).
... I remember once seeing a "one in four" claim, which was actually based on people who said they'd had sex then regretted it, or something like that.) So unfortunately it tells us little about the real number.
It would be rather bad if you couldn't, because this would basically criminalise adults having sex when drunk - even if afterwards, they still both agreed they wanted to, it would still be illegal because they couldn't consent. Also, it would mean the woman should be guilty if the man is drunk.
But yes, your point still stands - that 10% figure is about people who report rapes, and sadly it's a common myth that if you're drunk then change your mind the next day, it counts as rape. (Also I'd like to see a source for that 10% figure
The worrying thing is that whilst most "rape myths" are condemned, it seems to be a taboo to speak out against these sorts of myths.
Rather, it's about several things that contribute to brawling prowess: average deliverable impulse, average willingness to injure, average willingness to kill, average willingness to flee (which short-circuits the fight-for-your-life aggression). My sense is that women lose on all four counts to men.
... so by the same reasoning, they should have more to fear (and indeed, plenty of us probably do).
On average, though. Let's face it, I'm sure there are plenty here on Slashdot that lose out on all four counts to the "average" man
Ever walk to your car in a dark parking lot? When you do, do you give thought to being attacked? I don't, but almost every woman I've asked says she does.
There's a different between how people feel, and the actual risk - these shouldn't be conflated.
And actually yes, I do fear being attacked when out at night, because these things do happen to men (and no, it isn't because they get in bar fights).
Not that it makes it right - it's not a competition. Where there is a common factor though is that it's most likely to be (a minority of) men committing the violence.
I have a hard time believing Vista is, by design, that bad.
It isn't, it's made up, see the other responses about this being a reworking of an old anti-Mac troll.
But yes, given the content of this article, it had me fooled at first too. I'm no fan of Vista and I'm happy sticking with XP, but now I'm not sure we can trust any of the bad claims about Vista being thrown about here.
let's assume somebody uses the music player on average for 2 hours every day, then you'd be using about 1/8 of a single AA battery between each recharge, or approximately 10% of your cellphone battery (which has roughly equal mAh to an AA). It's not enough to matter.
The problem is not average use, it's occasions where say, I might be going away for a weekend and have less opportunity to plug it into a socket to recharge, and whilst travelling I might be listening to if for many more hours. A weekend away is just about what my phone can manage (though I guess I do have a 3G one which sucks battery life), and I'm careful not to use mp3 playing on such occasions. On an average day though, it doesn't matter.
Look at it this way, if they simply made the cellphone battery 10% larger to compensate, that would add by far less weight and expense than carrying a second, standalone mp3 device.
Sure, if they did do that, they could make a combined phone/mp3/camera device that also had a combined battery that lasted as long as of all of those things, whilst still being smaller. But they don't.
Wikipedia fails it again: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, Ent, TAS. (The animated series. It had Niven-style Kzin. It's worse than it sounds. Look it up.)
... but yeah, add them both in if you like.
Wikipedia doesn't fail it, I'm pretty sure it mentioned TAS. I chose not to include it because I was only counting non-cartoons and I wasn't sure how "canon" it was. I didn't include the animated Stargate either
I bet you $1 Youtube is gone in 10 years, or if not gone, certainly forgotten.
Do you mean YouTube specifically, or are you saying any online video site? I bet YouTube won't be around too, but the OP's point wasn't specific to that particular site.
But he should know everything about computer science, and that would include the kind of math the computer is best at. Not every algorithim you're ever going to need is going to be already in an abstracted dynamic link library. And if you know binary math and boolean algebra, you'll understand how to write a new algorithim in such a way in a higher level language so that the compiler will end up with a very efficient and reusable piece of machine code.
I guess I suck then, as I don't know everything there is to know ever about computer science.
Out of interest, can you give me an example where knowledge of the assembly can allow you to write code to improve the efficiency of the code the compiler outputs? I'm not saying it never happens - but does this happen for all types of programmers, and how often does it occur compared with say writing efficient algorithms in the first place?