I would love to see these judges SUED and jailed if one of the people whose case they dismiss subsequently kill someone on their next DUI.
I'd love to see you be falsely accused of a crime, and then found guilty on flimsy evidence because the judge feared being sued on the small chance that you were guilty.
Alternatively, what if a judge was sued by someone who was wrongly convicted and later proven innocent?
You bought a cassette because you wanted something easy to use and portable. But it was something you knew wouldn't last.
But did he buy the physical cassette, or a licence to listen to the music?
If the former, then whilst he doesn't have a right to download a new copy, he should have a right to do what he likes with that physical cassette, including copying it and giving it to someone else.
Of course, all too often the record companies tells us we can't do that, because we didn't buy the physical cassette, only a right to listen to the music. If they also tell us that we don't have a licence to listen to the music, this is a case of the record companies wanting to have their cake and eat it.
The odds passengers being killed by a vigilante is way lower than being killed by a terrorist. Essentially, it's clear that terrorists intend to kill and are not bargaining with anyone. This makes it about a 100% chance that someone will be killed when terrorists attack
Except the probability that terrorists are on a given plane is extremely small, where as every plane would have a large number of armed people on board.
Even if we accepted that the situation would always be better off with armed people, in the case of a terrorist attack, you have to factor in the possibility of injury or death, due to anything from accidental firing, a paranoid "vigilante" who mistakenly thinks someone is a terrorist, or people who cause trouble or get into fights (just because a person isn't someone we would consider a "criminal" doesn't mean they're not some random nutter, or never turn angry and start a fight or whatever).
I can't say which situation would be worse, but then neither can you. You have to look at what will happen on any flight, not just flights with terrorists on board. Personally I'd rather risk it with no guns.
The video toaster was its biggest market for business use, but remember that the Amiga was immensely popular has a home computer here in Europe - and I doubt many of those people buying it cared about the video toaster.
Ahhh... I remember the rabid Amiga fans of the late 1980's. Never passing up an opportunity to deliver an unsolicited "the Amiga is better, you should get one because... blah blah blah..." I remember being on the receiving end of this while wirewrapping a 8051 microcontroller, with the suggestion that I use a $500 GP computer to replace a $40 uC. They were really quite a PITA.
This sounds an awful lot like the Mac community of today rather than Linux - certainly I only ever hear those things you describe with respect to Macs, and rarely Linux (and in my experience, it happens far more now than I ever heard it from Amiga users).
The Amiga was a groundbreaking machine and all, but it's groundbreaking features were of little use in business, which was driving the PC market at that point, and AmigaOS was just horrible.
Well personally I found it miles better than DOS or MacOS, and not everyone wanted a piece of business equipment in their home;)
My understanding is that copyrights, unlike patents, do not apply if someone has independently written the same thing. It's quite likely that someone might coincidentally write out four items on a shopping list, but it's quite unlikely that someone would independently reproduce an entire book.
But if someone takes that list, and transfers the content to their PDA because they prefer that format, they have abused my rights as a copyright holder, unless I specifically gave them permission to do such a thing.
I'd say that that's an overly strict version of copyright whether we're talking about shopping lists or songs, books and so on. Even if it's a book, I want the right to transfer it to a different format (under "fair use").
No, it's a licence (that's why it's called a licence)
Why does everyone seem to think that "licence" and "tax" are mutually exclusive terms? Sure, it's a licence, but it seems reasonable to me to call it a tax also.
I know some people who have successfully argued it - in at least one case legitimately (video editing suite). So it's not a compulsory tax.
Plenty of taxes aren't paid by everyone - however, it's compulsory if you meet the criteria for having to pay it, and so is just like any other tax.
Personally, I don't want a combined pda, phone, camera and mp3-player since all such devices seem to be bad at everything they do. Big, clunky things
But if you're worried about size and clunkiness, surely that's one of the big advantages of having a combined device?
My mp3-playing phone is pretty small as it is, and it's certainly smaller than carrying around a phone and a separate mp3 player.
If I'm not bothered about size, I'll take my mp3 CD player which means I can carry GBs of music at a fraction of the cost of a hard drive based player. If I am bothered about size - the main area where a hard drive based one beats a CD based one - then an mp3 phone does even better.
Sure, there are other problems (it's annoying having to share the battery life between several things), and overall a dedicated mp3 player is certainly better, but size is one of the advantages of a phone.
As for limited storage, they can store as much as the smaller mp3 players such as the ipod shuffle.
I use texts because:
- It can be quicker if I just want to send some quick information rather than having a chat,
- I'm someone who usually prefers to write rather than talk,
- The other person might not be available at the time,
- I might want to send a message to more than one person.
I don't see why people would text just to be trendy - if they want to show off their mobiles, it's more obvious to talk on them rather than send a text which is noticeable to no one. You might as well claim that people only use mobiles "because it's trendy".
Yes, the last time we needed national ID was when there was a world war. Even all through the cold war with the threat of thermonuclear holocaust, an ID card was not considered necessary or worthwhile.
But now, obviously we must obviously live in far more dangerous times to need not just ID cards, but ones linked to electronic databases.
Well that's basically God of the gaps - "we don't understand it, so God must have done it".
Firstly I have a hard time accepting that as an explanation, since you now introduce more questions about what God is. If we come across something that we don't know how it happened, such as life beginning, and say "It was done by wibble", how on earth does that explain anything? So that's how I would reject point (1).
There is no way to test for the existance of, or disprove wibble, because we have no idea what it is.
If you think that "God" is a reasonable explanation and counts as a theory, then we easily satisfy part (2) by fudging the bits we don't understand by saying it "just happened", or invoke mysterious magical forces - whatever fudge you invoke to fill in the gaps we don't understand, there is nothing to suggest that it needs to be sentient, intelligent, worthy of worship or anything else.
Furthermore, there are other requirements for being a theory than just being unfalsifiable - theories must make predictions which can be tested. What predictive power does ID have?
What's the difference between "higher power" and God then?
And I'm not sure it's a good idea to acknowledge something that we have no knowledge about!
Here in the UK when I was in the Scouts, the references were definitely to "God" and not "higher power". I believe that this was technically "any" God (and I think the Girl Guides had changed all their stuff to say "my God"), but in practice this doesn't make much difference: firstly this "any" God still has to be a single God that you have to worship - ruling out atheists/agnostics, polytheists, and theists who believe that God has no influence over the Universe or doesn't care about us, etc.
Secondly, there were plenty of things (such as ceremonies, religious services, prayers) which were clearly entirely Christian - suddenly the whole idea of "any God" (or higher power) didn't really apply.
Of course, this is the UK where even state schools have Christian prayers and preaching, so things may be better in other countries.
I have every right to say that Homo-sexuality is unnatural.
Sure, and others have just as much right to call you ignorant and bigoted because of that.
Someone says 'Gays are unnatural' and they are supposedly closeminded, bigoted, hatefull... But the second someone says hatefull things about a christian (or like-minded person), its okay for them to say it's 'wrong' for me to believe in what the Bible says?
In my experience, there are far more people who are sympathetic about hatred or insults against religion, than there are about hatred against homosexuality. Outside of this Slashdot thread, support for religion is huge, but there is plenty of homophobia around. So I don't think it's fair to say that you aren't getting to state your views.
And here's another thing to consider - are you saying that people call you bigoted when you simply say you are a Christian, or only after you have told them that homosexuality is wrong? In the former case, then fair enough, it's wrong for them to call you that just because of your views. But in the latter case, they have every right to say that! You have forced your distasteful (to them) view onto them, and they have given you their response.
Atheists don't believe in a god. Agnostics don't know about god.
Indeed, one definition of agnosticsm is claiming that it is impossible to ever know whether there is a god or not, which is a positive belief, unlike atheism.
Although to add to that, here in the UK the "US" version of a billion (ie, 10^9) seems to be common, and possibly more common than the older "English" version. Certainly the UK media always use billion to mean 10^9.
Given how often terms like "billion" are used in the media, yet people still refer to an english billion being 10^12, I do sometimes wonder how many people misinterpret the number..
Now sure, it's a belief, and as such I have no problem with it being taught in Religious Education lessons (along with all the other religious beliefs in the world). I doubt many people would have a problem with that - the problem is with people who insist it being taught in science lessons.
If there were people who believed in pink unicorns, would you allow it to be taught that pink unicorns existed in science lessons? (The comparison isn't meant to be insulting by the way - surely you should respect the faith of people who believe in unicorns?)
I think MarthaStewart32 needs to jump off, you mean;)
I agree with what you're basically saying (I think it is true that we can never be 100% sure that something will happen, but for all practical purposes, we can be close enough to assume it will). The poster I was replying to seemed to suggest that some things (gravity, evolution) were "only" theories, but that some things in science have been proven, and that if gravity and evolution could be proven, they would be elevated to some new status beyond "theory".
My response is that a theory is as good as you can get in science. We can only "prove" gravity by making our theories more accurate, and never in some absolute sense, so saying "We haven't proved gravity yet, but if we could..." doesn't make sense.
I'm well aware of what a scientific theory was; I was curious if you were. The link you posted quotes "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory."
A theory is as good as it gets in science, so it is misleading to talk about gravity and evolution as if they could be proven, and as if there exist some things in science which have been proven.
Descarte asked the question how can any man believe that what he perceives is truthful. He was asking, if I see a yellow sun, how can I trust my perception that the sun is really yellow. Maybe what you see is red, but we both call it yellow.
You're confusing "colour" in the sense of the sort of light that the sun radiates, with that in the sense of what colours we perceive. So what if someone else sees yellow the way I see red - we can still both agree that the sun is "yellow", and make a consistent objective statement about reality.
As for the rest of your "proof", if you make the claim that people can only conceive of a perfect being if a perfect being placed that knowledge inside us, then either: - That perfect being exists, - We can't conceive of a perfect being, or, - Your claim that we can only conceive of a perfect being if that being exists is false. Oh, and replace "God" with "The Perfect Easter Bunny", and still tell me that you accept that proof.
And since only God knows true Good, we must live according to his definition, and not ours.
It's a shame that no one knows what his definition is then.
Take sex for example. Pope John Paul II wrote there is something better in having mystery, rather than viewing all people as a sexual object. By having mystery, you view people more completely, not just quickly dismissing them. That is why pre-marital sex is evil- there is some good missing.
How is having pre-marital sex the same as "viewing all people as a sexual object"? And even if you think the mystery of sex is better than sex, that means you shouldn't have sex at all. Marriage has nothing to do with this.
As society gets more secular and starts making judgements without God, we will become more miserable.
Well, the people who are unable to justify their reasons without relying on "God said so!" might be miserable. The rest of us will do fine.
Aside from the fact that there were many good things about the OS alone, as others have mentioned, what about the possibility of companies producing new Amigas, running the OS on non-commodity hardware?
There were plenty of companies wanting to produce new Amigas, but they were ultimately prevented by not being able to licence the OS. Now finally there are two new Amigas - the AmigaOne (running the official AmigaOS, which for years hadn't been developed), or the Pegasos (which runs an AmigaOS clone that had to be written from scratch). Imagine if this sort of thing could be done 5 or more years earlier?
It has been PROVEN (and it's a well-known fact) that it's impossible to create a Turing machine which will determine if a given expression is true or false
Surely you mean it's impossible to create a turing machine that will determine if all expressions are true or false - ie, that there will always exist an expression that cannot be proved or disproved? I don't see how this prevents a computer proving or disproving a statement where such a proof exists.
Also I don't see how a turing machine is different to a human. We can't prove whether the continuum hypothesis is true or not in ZFC, that doesn't mean that we can't prove things at all.
And I have yet to see a virus forwarded from an Amiga.
(As often is the case, pro-Mac points often apply to any non-Windows machine. Again, it's not just market share - for example, whilst Amiga email clients support scripting, they do not seem to support automated propagation of emails which has caused so many problems with Outlook. But at the same time, I would never suggest that AmigaOS as a whole was more secure, merely based on how many viruses there are propagated from such machines these days.)
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I would love to see these judges SUED and jailed if one of the people whose case they dismiss subsequently kill someone on their next DUI.
I'd love to see you be falsely accused of a crime, and then found guilty on flimsy evidence because the judge feared being sued on the small chance that you were guilty.
Alternatively, what if a judge was sued by someone who was wrongly convicted and later proven innocent?
You bought a cassette because you wanted something easy to use and portable. But it was something you knew wouldn't last.
But did he buy the physical cassette, or a licence to listen to the music?
If the former, then whilst he doesn't have a right to download a new copy, he should have a right to do what he likes with that physical cassette, including copying it and giving it to someone else.
Of course, all too often the record companies tells us we can't do that, because we didn't buy the physical cassette, only a right to listen to the music. If they also tell us that we don't have a licence to listen to the music, this is a case of the record companies wanting to have their cake and eat it.
The odds passengers being killed by a vigilante is way lower than being killed by a terrorist. Essentially, it's clear that terrorists intend to kill and are not bargaining with anyone. This makes it about a 100% chance that someone will be killed when terrorists attack
Except the probability that terrorists are on a given plane is extremely small, where as every plane would have a large number of armed people on board.
Even if we accepted that the situation would always be better off with armed people, in the case of a terrorist attack, you have to factor in the possibility of injury or death, due to anything from accidental firing, a paranoid "vigilante" who mistakenly thinks someone is a terrorist, or people who cause trouble or get into fights (just because a person isn't someone we would consider a "criminal" doesn't mean they're not some random nutter, or never turn angry and start a fight or whatever).
I can't say which situation would be worse, but then neither can you. You have to look at what will happen on any flight, not just flights with terrorists on board. Personally I'd rather risk it with no guns.
The video toaster was its biggest market for business use, but remember that the Amiga was immensely popular has a home computer here in Europe - and I doubt many of those people buying it cared about the video toaster.
Ahhh... I remember the rabid Amiga fans of the late 1980's. Never passing up an opportunity to deliver an unsolicited "the Amiga is better, you should get one because... blah blah blah..." I remember being on the receiving end of this while wirewrapping a 8051 microcontroller, with the suggestion that I use a $500 GP computer to replace a $40 uC. They were really quite a PITA.
;)
This sounds an awful lot like the Mac community of today rather than Linux - certainly I only ever hear those things you describe with respect to Macs, and rarely Linux (and in my experience, it happens far more now than I ever heard it from Amiga users).
The Amiga was a groundbreaking machine and all, but it's groundbreaking features were of little use in business, which was driving the PC market at that point, and AmigaOS was just horrible.
Well personally I found it miles better than DOS or MacOS, and not everyone wanted a piece of business equipment in their home
My understanding is that copyrights, unlike patents, do not apply if someone has independently written the same thing. It's quite likely that someone might coincidentally write out four items on a shopping list, but it's quite unlikely that someone would independently reproduce an entire book.
But if someone takes that list, and transfers the content to their PDA because they prefer that format, they have abused my rights as a copyright holder, unless I specifically gave them permission to do such a thing.
I'd say that that's an overly strict version of copyright whether we're talking about shopping lists or songs, books and so on. Even if it's a book, I want the right to transfer it to a different format (under "fair use").
No, it's a licence (that's why it's called a licence)
Why does everyone seem to think that "licence" and "tax" are mutually exclusive terms? Sure, it's a licence, but it seems reasonable to me to call it a tax also.
I know some people who have successfully argued it - in at least one case legitimately (video editing suite). So it's not a compulsory tax.
Plenty of taxes aren't paid by everyone - however, it's compulsory if you meet the criteria for having to pay it, and so is just like any other tax.
Personally, I don't want a combined pda, phone, camera and mp3-player since all such devices seem to be bad at everything they do. Big, clunky things
But if you're worried about size and clunkiness, surely that's one of the big advantages of having a combined device?
My mp3-playing phone is pretty small as it is, and it's certainly smaller than carrying around a phone and a separate mp3 player.
If I'm not bothered about size, I'll take my mp3 CD player which means I can carry GBs of music at a fraction of the cost of a hard drive based player. If I am bothered about size - the main area where a hard drive based one beats a CD based one - then an mp3 phone does even better.
Sure, there are other problems (it's annoying having to share the battery life between several things), and overall a dedicated mp3 player is certainly better, but size is one of the advantages of a phone.
As for limited storage, they can store as much as the smaller mp3 players such as the ipod shuffle.
I use texts because:
- It can be quicker if I just want to send some quick information rather than having a chat,
- I'm someone who usually prefers to write rather than talk,
- The other person might not be available at the time,
- I might want to send a message to more than one person.
I don't see why people would text just to be trendy - if they want to show off their mobiles, it's more obvious to talk on them rather than send a text which is noticeable to no one. You might as well claim that people only use mobiles "because it's trendy".
Yes, the last time we needed national ID was when there was a world war. Even all through the cold war with the threat of thermonuclear holocaust, an ID card was not considered necessary or worthwhile.
But now, obviously we must obviously live in far more dangerous times to need not just ID cards, but ones linked to electronic databases.
Well that's basically God of the gaps - "we don't understand it, so God must have done it".
Firstly I have a hard time accepting that as an explanation, since you now introduce more questions about what God is. If we come across something that we don't know how it happened, such as life beginning, and say "It was done by wibble", how on earth does that explain anything? So that's how I would reject point (1).
There is no way to test for the existance of, or disprove wibble, because we have no idea what it is.
If you think that "God" is a reasonable explanation and counts as a theory, then we easily satisfy part (2) by fudging the bits we don't understand by saying it "just happened", or invoke mysterious magical forces - whatever fudge you invoke to fill in the gaps we don't understand, there is nothing to suggest that it needs to be sentient, intelligent, worthy of worship or anything else.
Furthermore, there are other requirements for being a theory than just being unfalsifiable - theories must make predictions which can be tested. What predictive power does ID have?
Rather, I do not see how this is any different than my existing driver's license.
But if that's true, why spend billions on something we already have?
What's the difference between "higher power" and God then?
And I'm not sure it's a good idea to acknowledge something that we have no knowledge about!
Here in the UK when I was in the Scouts, the references were definitely to "God" and not "higher power". I believe that this was technically "any" God (and I think the Girl Guides had changed all their stuff to say "my God"), but in practice this doesn't make much difference: firstly this "any" God still has to be a single God that you have to worship - ruling out atheists/agnostics, polytheists, and theists who believe that God has no influence over the Universe or doesn't care about us, etc.
Secondly, there were plenty of things (such as ceremonies, religious services, prayers) which were clearly entirely Christian - suddenly the whole idea of "any God" (or higher power) didn't really apply.
Of course, this is the UK where even state schools have Christian prayers and preaching, so things may be better in other countries.
I have every right to say that Homo-sexuality is unnatural.
Sure, and others have just as much right to call you ignorant and bigoted because of that.
Someone says 'Gays are unnatural' and they are supposedly closeminded, bigoted, hatefull... But the second someone says hatefull things about a christian (or like-minded person), its okay for them to say it's 'wrong' for me to believe in what the Bible says?
In my experience, there are far more people who are sympathetic about hatred or insults against religion, than there are about hatred against homosexuality. Outside of this Slashdot thread, support for religion is huge, but there is plenty of homophobia around. So I don't think it's fair to say that you aren't getting to state your views.
And here's another thing to consider - are you saying that people call you bigoted when you simply say you are a Christian, or only after you have told them that homosexuality is wrong? In the former case, then fair enough, it's wrong for them to call you that just because of your views. But in the latter case, they have every right to say that! You have forced your distasteful (to them) view onto them, and they have given you their response.
Atheists don't believe in a god. Agnostics don't know about god.
Indeed, one definition of agnosticsm is claiming that it is impossible to ever know whether there is a god or not, which is a positive belief, unlike atheism.
Although to add to that, here in the UK the "US" version of a billion (ie, 10^9) seems to be common, and possibly more common than the older "English" version. Certainly the UK media always use billion to mean 10^9.
Given how often terms like "billion" are used in the media, yet people still refer to an english billion being 10^12, I do sometimes wonder how many people misinterpret the number..
Except Creationism isn't a theory.
Now sure, it's a belief, and as such I have no problem with it being taught in Religious Education lessons (along with all the other religious beliefs in the world). I doubt many people would have a problem with that - the problem is with people who insist it being taught in science lessons.
If there were people who believed in pink unicorns, would you allow it to be taught that pink unicorns existed in science lessons? (The comparison isn't meant to be insulting by the way - surely you should respect the faith of people who believe in unicorns?)
I think MarthaStewart32 needs to jump off, you mean ;)
I agree with what you're basically saying (I think it is true that we can never be 100% sure that something will happen, but for all practical purposes, we can be close enough to assume it will). The poster I was replying to seemed to suggest that some things (gravity, evolution) were "only" theories, but that some things in science have been proven, and that if gravity and evolution could be proven, they would be elevated to some new status beyond "theory".
My response is that a theory is as good as you can get in science. We can only "prove" gravity by making our theories more accurate, and never in some absolute sense, so saying "We haven't proved gravity yet, but if we could..." doesn't make sense.
I'm well aware of what a scientific theory was; I was curious if you were. The link you posted quotes "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory."
A theory is as good as it gets in science, so it is misleading to talk about gravity and evolution as if they could be proven, and as if there exist some things in science which have been proven.
Gravity is a theory because it cant be proven. ... If evolution could be proven, it wouldn't be a theory. But it has yet to be proven.
But what scientific theories have been "proven"? And what did they turn into if they are then no longer theories?
Descarte asked the question how can any man believe that what he perceives is truthful. He was asking, if I see a yellow sun, how can I trust my perception that the sun is really yellow. Maybe what you see is red, but we both call it yellow.
You're confusing "colour" in the sense of the sort of light that the sun radiates, with that in the sense of what colours we perceive. So what if someone else sees yellow the way I see red - we can still both agree that the sun is "yellow", and make a consistent objective statement about reality.
As for the rest of your "proof", if you make the claim that people can only conceive of a perfect being if a perfect being placed that knowledge inside us, then either:
- That perfect being exists,
- We can't conceive of a perfect being, or,
- Your claim that we can only conceive of a perfect being if that being exists is false.
Oh, and replace "God" with "The Perfect Easter Bunny", and still tell me that you accept that proof.
And since only God knows true Good, we must live according to his definition, and not ours.
It's a shame that no one knows what his definition is then.
Take sex for example. Pope John Paul II wrote there is something better in having mystery, rather than viewing all people as a sexual object. By having mystery, you view people more completely, not just quickly dismissing them. That is why pre-marital sex is evil- there is some good missing.
How is having pre-marital sex the same as "viewing all people as a sexual object"? And even if you think the mystery of sex is better than sex, that means you shouldn't have sex at all. Marriage has nothing to do with this.
As society gets more secular and starts making judgements without God, we will become more miserable.
Well, the people who are unable to justify their reasons without relying on "God said so!" might be miserable. The rest of us will do fine.
Except creationism isn't a theory. It's conjecture - or at best a hypothesis, though not a very good one since it is unfalsifiable.
Aside from the fact that there were many good things about the OS alone, as others have mentioned, what about the possibility of companies producing new Amigas, running the OS on non-commodity hardware?
There were plenty of companies wanting to produce new Amigas, but they were ultimately prevented by not being able to licence the OS. Now finally there are two new Amigas - the AmigaOne (running the official AmigaOS, which for years hadn't been developed), or the Pegasos (which runs an AmigaOS clone that had to be written from scratch). Imagine if this sort of thing could be done 5 or more years earlier?
It has been PROVEN (and it's a well-known fact) that it's impossible to create a Turing machine which will determine if a given expression is true or false
Surely you mean it's impossible to create a turing machine that will determine if all expressions are true or false - ie, that there will always exist an expression that cannot be proved or disproved? I don't see how this prevents a computer proving or disproving a statement where such a proof exists.
Also I don't see how a turing machine is different to a human. We can't prove whether the continuum hypothesis is true or not in ZFC, that doesn't mean that we can't prove things at all.
And I have yet to see a virus forwarded from an Amiga.
(As often is the case, pro-Mac points often apply to any non-Windows machine. Again, it's not just market share - for example, whilst Amiga email clients support scripting, they do not seem to support automated propagation of emails which has caused so many problems with Outlook. But at the same time, I would never suggest that AmigaOS as a whole was more secure, merely based on how many viruses there are propagated from such machines these days.)