Well, there's no conclusive evidence that it is harmful either, now is there? Where's that study?
As far as I know there is no study about harm coming from amputation of the pinky finger, but cutting pinky fingers from babies would probably be less accepted, wouldn't it? The point is that you are mutilating a person without his consent. Your same arguments can be put in the mouth of some advocate of infibulation in a country where that is considered normal.
This is true of technology in general. Government and industry debate global warming and peak oil but do very little to actually address the issue since it costs so much to implement solutions.
Society is not an amorphous blob with a clear will and an appreciation of its own good. Society is made up by people, and what the decision makers think is "good" is not necessarily good for society; both because the decision makers might be wrong, and because their own interests may be different from those of society (you don't get to be president because you're Joe Average from Missouri).
In the case of Ipv4, as in the one of energy, the interest of society is to fix the problem. The interest of the decision makers, however, is not to fix it, because they are now sitting on a critical asset that is always in demand and that is getting increasingly scarce, and therefore more expensive. The near-disaster scenario is in their interest, because that way they will maximise their returns. It's like the owner of an oasis in the Sahara: rain and rivers would be bad for business, drought is more people depending on you.
I would expect China or India to come up with a solution first: they don't have many IP addresses to begin with, they have growing economies that will sooner or later require more IP addresses, and they have the means to kickstart a major project.
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When have you been in Cuba? I was there in the middle '90s (the periodo especial, when the economy was at its worst), and found out that most scaremongering about Cuba was just that—scaremongering. The news blabbered about continuous power outages, with electricity being available only a few hours a day. Funny enough, Havana's lights were on all night long (not just our hotel, the whole city).
Personally, I'd rather have the aforementioned fast food restaurants than hordes of military personnel with automatic weapons all over the place.
Never seen this kind of military presence. The only military I saw were at Matanzas airport (duh, fair enough), and three grunts (including one gruntess) marching on a country road that we drove by.
The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles. The authoritarian presence.
Funny, I saw no particularly crumbling buildings to speak of. No beggars either. People in Havana and elsewhere we travelled (from Pinár del Rio to Santa Clara) looked like they were not rich, but lived with dignity. Then again, a certain American subculture may consider any historically significant building as "crumbling"...
The warning to tourists to stay in designated tourist zones.
Well, I for one did not receive any such warning. In fact we could go around freely. My father saw a street concert improvised by some locals in Havana, where the police intervened—lo and behold—to pick up broken bottles of beer so people would not hurt themselves.
If you have truly been there, I cannot understand how or why you would think that American chain restaurants are somehow worse than the abject human misery that dominates that island.
Have you truly been there, to pass that kind of judgements?
The Bloqueo is America's version of the Berlin Wall. They tell you that it's against the enemy, while in fact what its ideators conceived it as a cultural divide, so idea would spread from Cuba to the mainland. Guess what would happen if someone made a movie about 9/11 rescue workers who cannot afford medical care in the US and get cured in the free-for-all Cuban system...
Sure, Cuba has its share of problems: corruption, impediments to free speech, same leadership for too much time. However, looking at how these problems were tackled in the countries recently "liberated" by the US, I doubt the Cubans will be any better off with a US-sponsored regime change.
The best we Europeans can do next time is not vote for.. oh wait, the Commission isn't a democratically elected body.
True indeed, but without approval from the European Parliament the Commission cannot do squat. That's how software patents were busted: the commission wanted them, the parliament told them to go fornicate themselves with a pitchfork (648 to 14, that's a pretty clear vote).
But when I was a child, questioning evolution and asking for more support for it (I was a kid in high school; I had no clear definition of it) was not met with the knowledge I asked for but derision for so stupidly questioning the God-given truth handed down by our priestly scientists.
Evolution is simple, it builds on two observations:
Every generation of all observed species reproduce so that their growth would be exponential if left to itself;
They do not grow exponentially (in a stable ecosystem), because some animals die, and the population stays constant (by definition of steady state).
At this point, it is just a question of keeping in mind that, by definition, those that will survive will be the fittest to, duh, survive. The reasoning is elegant and sound, and the hypotheses are fairly obvious to verify (there is no animal whose female stops reproducing after exactly two kids, and animals in nature get killed on a pretty routine basis).
Evolution is supported by a mountain of evidence so big you could make it round and call it a a planet. Thousands and thousands of paleontological excavations have yielded an obvious evolutionary sequence, with animals and plants gradually changing into each other. Evolution is a theory that is very easy to falsify: you only need to find a bunny in the Cretacean layer. Guess what, no one ever found neither the bunny nor any other equivalent inconsistency.
[...] science should be all about questioning the status quo.
Nope. Science is not about questioning the status quo for the sake of questioning, but open-mindedness in questioning it when facts are found contradicting it. You can't just start saying that entropy in the universe decreases instead of increasing just because you can question the status quo. Well, you can, but you will likely treated like Granpa Simpson. You can say that if you find evidence contradicting the theory, or if you have an alternative (preferably simpler and/or more elegant) theory explaining the data.
some of these anti-science people are in fact more faithful to the underpinnings of science than those people who arrogantly call themselves scientists.
Yeah right. Some religious nuts are contesting science because it contradicts their scripture, which they by stupid blind faith believe to be infallible, and they would be skeptics and true to the spirit of science? Or are you thinking of those lawyers in the White House rewriting the scientific reports of climatologists? Or pseudo-scientists like Bjørn Lomborg, who make a job of faking statistics in fields they know nothing about, and then raking in the money from big business?
it should ALWAYS be okay to question what we're told.
It is alright. But before questioning, you have to RTFM.
Don't think anything's going to be fixed by improving science education. [...] The solution is to fix the scientists and their massive egos.
Right, the solution is not to study and understand science, the solution is to get scientists back in line. Sounds an awful lot like Lysenkoism.
Pumping CO2 underground on the other hand, I'm sorry, but I have a hard time accepting that as a reasonable alternative. [...] What if a massive cloud of CO2 is released suddenly, due to a massive earthquake or whatnot?
Statoil has been pumping CO2 underground in the Sleipner field off the coast of Norway for a few years now. You have to keep in mind that, at those pressures, CO2 becomes a liquid; but, even as a gas, you are putting CO2 in underground pockets that have a proven record of holding gas and hydrocarbons for millions of years: that's the safest place on earth.
As an energy engineer with a specialization in petroleum, my opinion is that of course we should pursue better and cleaner energy sources (be it wind, solar, or the best of them all energy conservation—yes it's an energy source) but as long as we are stuck with the present system we have to live with it, and the best thing we can do with the excess carbon is to put it where it came from in the first place.
Of course, if earthquakes could fracture reservoirs so that gas would escape to the surface they would have done it already in the past millions of years. If we find gas or oil (which almost always has a gas cap anyway) in a reservoir, it means it could not escape for geological times. That's a storage as safe as they come.
No, he deserted, and that just days before the end of the war when the army was in disarray and everybody was doing that. That was just out of self-preservation, not opposition to the Nazi regime.
He was drafted into the army by a fascist state. Not something he had any choice over or should be blamed for.
Some people, at the risk of their lives, defected. He stayed in the system. Many others did, like Nobel laureate Günther Grass, but Grass lived an entire life of anti-fascist political activity afterwards. Another Nobel laureate, Dario Fo, was drafted but defected at the first occasion to join the resistance. Note that Fo was born in 1927, less than one month before Benedict XVI, and Grass is only six months older. And anyway, the point was to point the irony with the six-million figure indicated by the parent post, when Ratzinger was among those that helped establish that tally.
the activities [of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] we now associate with "the Inquisition" ended centuries before Ratzinger's birth.
They are not allowed to torture people anymore with the comfy chair, but their main activity is still censorship and repression of free thought within the Church. He could have chosen to be a missionary like Mother Theresa, but preferred the activity of a censoring bureaucrat.
He holds no legal authority outside a few blocks in Rome.
Man, I am Italian and I wish it were like that. He has far more authority in the country than politicians. He says what he wants, and politicians usually give it to him because too few dare to tell him to mind his business, even though the separation of state and church should be a principle in the agreements the Italian state has with the Vatican. Partly it's because being "catholic", over here, is like being "patriotic" in the US. He is currently attacking the Italian abortion law: instead of simply telling catholics not to have abortions, he wants to make it illegal for everybody. Some people still remember how it was before the abortion law: double as many abortions and all performed by untrained, shady figures, resulting in women dying every year.
Yes, the Pope does wear papal vestments, although "dressed in gold" is another exaggeration.
I probably did not finish the thought in my original post. It is not just that the pope is actually dressed in clothes that would cover significant charity projects and probably save hundreds of lives from starvation, the Church as a whole is actually a quite greedy parasite. They get about 0.8% of the Italian income tax and all their activities (including the for-profit ones) are tax-exempt, which in the last 20 years has allowed them to amass a fortune. Weren't these the guys who should preach poverty?
In a local article about this, I read that a former Pope FOUNDED the school, which I find quite ironic.
Not just any pope either, it was Boniface VIII. Dante hated him and destined him to his hell for simony (with the other damned asking "Is Boniface here yet?"). Since Dante's Inferno is the most read of the three books of the Commedia and compulsory reading for high-school students in Italy, pretty much every Italian connects Boniface VII with corruption, greed, hypocrisy and lust for power. Which brings us back to the current pope...
But last time I checked, there were not 6 million scientists killed after which the Pope denied it.
You are obviously aware that the Pope served in the Wehrmacht, his previous employment was as head of the Inquisition (which did in fact kill a few people in its heyday), forbids the use of condoms and family planning resulting in disease and famine, goes around dressed in gold (that's the first vice-boss who dresses better than the boss), that through history the catholic church has in fact persecuted scientists like Galileo, whose trial the current Pope considered "fair", and that exact quotation was the cause for the initial protest, aren't you?
The death penalty certainly doesn't seem to be a deterrent against corruption.
The death penalty is not a deterrent for anything. There are some pretty draconian laws for capital punishment for street crimes in the US, but it's not like those US states are safer than Canada because of that.
Corruption is deterred by transparency, street crime by welfare, equal opportunities and affirmative action, but the death penalty is a so much more spectacular way of convincing voters you are doing something about it when you are actually not.
The guy is an idiot and a criminal and he should go to prison.
If I had been the guy's lawyer, the first thing I would have argued is that since the evidence was not uncovered by a sworn police officer, it could have been planted. What if this guy was a rude on the clerk, who was a vindictive bastard and decided to frame him? Or maybe a jolly clerk may have decided to pull a prank that went out of control when someone in the shop contacted the police ("hey Jimbo! this guy's name is Sodomsky, guess what I found on his drive!").
Yes, the courts could have checked the last-modified filestat, but that can be tampered too.
The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite.
It would be interesting to see your source about this. The claim on OpenOffice.org Writer may be credible, but KWord (I suppose you meant that by KWrite, since KWrite is a very basic text editor) is way faster and snappier than MS Word (fine, it has also less features and all, but it is faster to load), and I am not going to believe your claim without data to support it.
GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe,
Not sure about GEdit, but Notepad is almost featureless and has not changed in a decade or so. It has no code highlighting, no handling of different line endings, no support for different encodings, no tab handling, no plugin framework, no multi-file mode, and in fact its only feature is a search feature without regular expressions. Of course it's going to be fast. For that sake "Hello world" is even faster. I do most of my programming in Kate and I am very happy with that. Notepad may be faster, but it does not do what a text editor is supposed to do in order to be useful.
D'oh, it would be helpful to know which kind of patch we are talking about. Is that security? If so, how critical? Is that a theoretical case, or a gaping hole that is a dead giveaway to any script kiddie? Is the problem just annoying or mission-critical? Is that going to be used in a network? As a server service? On which platform? If it is a new feature, does it require re-engineering of the code base, or is it a drop-in feature you can be over with in half an hour?
Most importantly, is your code base well-architectured, or is it a filthy can of worms you cannot possibly modify without breaking something?
In my (tiny-sized) company, if the boss or other users of our in-house software need new features or a bug fixed, I have the habit of listening first to requirements and estimating time-to-delivery later, and I have a hunch most developers do just that. Sometimes it's half an hour, sometimes it takes three months. Last estimate I gave was "anything between two weeks and six months", when the boss gave me some very vague description of the next package we are to develop.
Ok, that's an interesting point. IANAL either, but the highlighted part in the post you link to seems to be superfluous: it says that:
Publishing activity can also be pursued in non-enterpreneurial form for no profit.
Whereas the previous sentence read:
Publishing activity is understood to be every activity aimed at the production and distribution of publishing products, and also the collection of the related advertisement revenue.
I do not know whether this is azzeccagarbugli-speak, but it looks like the first sentence already specifies that all writing and publishing is covered, without any specification on whether it is for- or no-profit; the second part seems to be superficial. Then again, it is a lousy law draft.
Anyway, I do not believe this is relevant: the law has not yet been passed, not even discussed in Parliament in fact, so they only have to change article 5, and any problem with the Constitution is over; yet, registration is still required from anyone who has a website.
Fortunately, with all the noise that it made, this draft has the chances of a paper cat chasing an asbestos rat through hell of becoming a law.
Art.5 of the new proposal violates art.3 comma 2, art.9, art.21 and art.41 of the Constitution.
Article 5 of the proposal defines "publishing activity" as production, distribution and collecting advertisement revenue. Did you mean article 6, the one that makes it compulsory for anyone with a "publishing activity" to register?
As for the Constitution articles, let's flesh them out one by one:
Article 3:2 says It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic and social nature which, really limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, impede the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organization of the country. This has not much to do with publishing. If it were to be as widely interpreted as you seem to want it to be, then they should abolish train and public-transport fares (hey, I'm in favor of that), completely cover all costs of political activity and so on.
Article 9 says The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research. It safeguards landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation. This is about universities and higher educations. It does not even state that research is free. Writing on a website has little to do with this article.
Article 21 says All have the right to express freely their own thought by word, in writing and by all other means of communication. The press cannot be subjected to authorization or censorship. [...] Printed publications, shows and other displays contrary to morality are forbidden. The law establishes appropriate means for preventing and suppressing all violations. It seems to me that this article's last two sentences were written by some fascist, and are already now something that should be abolished. Aside that, compulsory registration does not eliminate your freedom of speech, it only makes it difficult to actually use it. Anyone familiar with Italian bureaucracy will know that registering is going to take time, effort, probably money, a decent amount of patience, and of course approving the registration may take forever: in the law proposal, there are no maximum terms after which registration must be granted.
Article 41 says Private economic initiative is free. [...] This has, again, nothing to do with what we were discussing. We were discussing personal websites, not commercial ones. This article is not about freedom of speech: indeed, it is listed under "Title III: Economic relations", not "Title I: Civil Rights".
So, again, I do not see what is directly unconstitutional about this law proposal. Of course, my opinion is that this means there is a problem in the Constitution, not that the proposal is fine. Feel free to elaborate.
I know the text of the law and if you feel the need to insult me instead of discussing, you're not obtaining much, at least from me.
No you don't, you have only been skimming the article headings, as your post proves. If it were not for the fact that you can write English, I would suspect you were a shill from some think-tank close to UDEUR, posting from a dark and moist dungeon or something like that. A pointer in that direction is that your account was created specifically for this thread, but let's not be too much of a conspiracy theorist for today.
First of all you're discussing as if this is already law, and it's not the case.
I'll benevolently put aside the fact that I did nowhere say the law was already enforced, indeed I explicitly wrote "proposed law" in the first line; but, even so, am I allowed to cry foul only when the law is actually passed? Am I supposed to stand idle until politicians are finished enacting racial laws, collecting bribes, selling weapons to dictators?
Moreover, you comment one single line of the law.
Do'h, 'cause, dude, that's the part under scrutiny that's making all this noise. Ever heard the word "focus"?
Let me think it's a bit superficial, at least, and give me a reasonable explanation of why Mr Levi should lie on the most important newspaper when he's already widely under attack.
Oh, now you convinced me. Right, why would ever a politician lie when he is caught red-handed?
In the full text of the law there are explicit references only to subject operating in the editorial field commercially, excluding resellers (art 6). Article 8 of the law defines what it's considered "editorial field" as (point 2) "The definition of the relevant markets which constitutes the editorial sector is done by the Authority of guarantee of Communications according to the the Antitrust authority".
I wonder whether you are actually reading what you are writing. The article you mention basically says that the government-appointed Authority of Communications has discretionary powers to decide where the gun is actually going to be aimed. It is placing a ludicrously large power in a body separated by three degrees from the people (authority -> government -> parliament -> people).
At point 3 they clarify that "Editorial markets usually have national dimensions, but for regional and interregional cases, the authority can define their regional extension differently".
Ahem, you know the Intahrweb? It's kind of global. Any Web page has at least "national dimensions".
Article 9 is about [... blah blah blah...] and the financial support to it.
What's the point with this summary of article headings you make here? The point of content are articles 2 and 6, it is the fact that non-commercial sites are subject to registration just like nation-wide newspapers. The text is quite clear about that, there is no distinction whatsoever.
If I perfectly agree the law is not clear enough in stating that bloggers and personal sites maintainer are not interested, it's a bit difficult to define these decisions as a way to close our mouths.
No, of course it was just a mistake. Why would they ever think of anything like that, especially after blogs have started appearing all over the place, not just Grillo's? An odd coincidence indeed.
Aside all the political siding here (which adds nothing to the discussion), you should notice that some articles of the law contradict the Constitution (the Italian Constitution, that is), therefore this law won't make it anywhere.
I wish I could believe that. The Constitution explicitly forbids financing private schools in article 33, yet private schools are financed using some creative accountability, such as calculating the savings to public school when a kid goes to private school. Anyway, which article of the Constitution would this law violate? Article 21 says nothing about being free from a requirement of registration. This is the same system applied to newspapers, it's not illegal today. The point is not to prohibit blogs, which would never get through the Constitutional Court, the point is to make it difficult to open one, or to make it a liability if you do open one without having gone through the bureaucracy, or to open a loophole so that blogs may be closed for some administrative reason.
Also, a minor correction: the main Italian newspaper is "Il Corriere della Sera", not "La Repubblica" (important, but not the main).
Hmm, I think I recall reading that Repubblica passed Corriere some months ago. The Wikipedia has only data from 2005, unfortunately.
The source of the information is not just Beppe Grillo's blog, since that redirects to this article by La Repubblica, the main Italian newspaper, and the text of the proposed law itself.
In the text of the proposed law, I read: (Art. 2:1)
Per prodotto editoriale si intende qualsiasi prodotto contraddistinto da finalità di informazione, di formazione, di divulgazione, di intrattenimento, che sia destinato alla pubblicazione, quali che siano la forma nella quale esso è realizzato e il mezzo con il quale esso viene diffuso.
This means, in brief, that any product with purpose of information, formation, diffusion and entertainment meant for publication is actually targeted by the law, with no exception for no-profit sites. You only need to be a provider of information to be required to register your activity (Art. 6:1). Mr. AlbertoP, you are talking out of your ass, and Mr. Levi in his interview is lying (or he's incompetent, or both).
Now, some background for you Americans about what is happening over in Italy: there is mounting dissatisfaction with the current political class, which is seen as highly corrupt and mostly busy with covering its ass. I voted for the current government (Prodi, centre-left), and there is no way I am going over to the other side (which would be Berlusconi's), but I am myself very dissatisfied with the current bipartisan climate, and it seems I am in good company. Last year the parliament passed a general pardon to solve an overpopulation problem in jails (you read right: too many criminals, let's put them back on the streets!) which caused a spike in crime rate; the actual reason for a pardon instead of building more jails was that the pardon covered also crimes committed by certain politicians. This, the fact that the government is more busy with infighting that with maintaining the promises given in their 280-page program presented at the last election, the personality of jackass-politician Clemente Mastella (who attended a mafioso's wedding and is now fittingly minister of Justice) and many other things caused a general discontent.
Enter Beppe Grillo. A well-known comedian with a history of getting banned and censored for jokes on politicians since the '80s, he started a blog a few years ago and, in the current climate, decided to organise a "Fuck-off day" ("Vaffanculo day", V-Day as in V for Vendetta), a series of national rallies all over Italy and abroad. 4-letter words aside, the idea was to gather signatures for some popular-initiative law proposals (no felons can run for office, two-term limit in parliament, and so on). About a million people participated, and 300,000 signatures were gathered (even on an Italian scale, this is quite a success).
Politicians got scared and started to attack Grillo almost in unison; this law is an effort to silence Grillo and anybody who would take his place.
For the good news: infrastructure minister Antonio Di Pietro (yes, I voted for his party and I'm damn happy I did) said that if this law proposal is not retired he's torpedoing the government and forcing new elections. Nothing straightens out politicians like the threat to lose their post... Grazie Tonino!
One day, people will realise that this sentence belongs in the same league of:
This ship cannot be sunk
640K will be enough for everyone
We have superior firepower, the Vietnamese will lose
We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down
History has ended
Market is powered by greed. Greed may improve the economy, but if you think greed is going to do any good to democracy, well you're in for a surprise.
I'm not sure how positive a man from Yorkshire is supposed to sound to a Texan over a transatlantic phone line
It's supposed to sound like a guy with the name and surname of the guy the HR gauleiter intended to hire to begin with, in order to repay some favour or because he had informally been given the task by some higher-up who needed his stupid son to finally get a job.
Just because they advertise the position does not mean they have not yet decided whom they are going to hire; it might well be a charade to fill a certain quota of interviews, so the hiring process looks clean. If they really had to come up with such a stupid justification, chances are you got bitten by something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know there is no study about harm coming from amputation of the pinky finger, but cutting pinky fingers from babies would probably be less accepted, wouldn't it? The point is that you are mutilating a person without his consent. Your same arguments can be put in the mouth of some advocate of infibulation in a country where that is considered normal.
Well, I won't comment the irony of your signature, but sure it is tempting...
Society is not an amorphous blob with a clear will and an appreciation of its own good. Society is made up by people, and what the decision makers think is "good" is not necessarily good for society; both because the decision makers might be wrong, and because their own interests may be different from those of society (you don't get to be president because you're Joe Average from Missouri).
In the case of Ipv4, as in the one of energy, the interest of society is to fix the problem. The interest of the decision makers, however, is not to fix it, because they are now sitting on a critical asset that is always in demand and that is getting increasingly scarce, and therefore more expensive. The near-disaster scenario is in their interest, because that way they will maximise their returns. It's like the owner of an oasis in the Sahara: rain and rivers would be bad for business, drought is more people depending on you.
I would expect China or India to come up with a solution first: they don't have many IP addresses to begin with, they have growing economies that will sooner or later require more IP addresses, and they have the means to kickstart a major project.
When have you been in Cuba? I was there in the middle '90s (the periodo especial, when the economy was at its worst), and found out that most scaremongering about Cuba was just that—scaremongering. The news blabbered about continuous power outages, with electricity being available only a few hours a day. Funny enough, Havana's lights were on all night long (not just our hotel, the whole city).
Never seen this kind of military presence. The only military I saw were at Matanzas airport (duh, fair enough), and three grunts (including one gruntess) marching on a country road that we drove by.
Funny, I saw no particularly crumbling buildings to speak of. No beggars either. People in Havana and elsewhere we travelled (from Pinár del Rio to Santa Clara) looked like they were not rich, but lived with dignity. Then again, a certain American subculture may consider any historically significant building as "crumbling"...
Well, I for one did not receive any such warning. In fact we could go around freely. My father saw a street concert improvised by some locals in Havana, where the police intervened—lo and behold—to pick up broken bottles of beer so people would not hurt themselves.
Have you truly been there, to pass that kind of judgements?
The Bloqueo is America's version of the Berlin Wall. They tell you that it's against the enemy, while in fact what its ideators conceived it as a cultural divide, so idea would spread from Cuba to the mainland. Guess what would happen if someone made a movie about 9/11 rescue workers who cannot afford medical care in the US and get cured in the free-for-all Cuban system...
Sure, Cuba has its share of problems: corruption, impediments to free speech, same leadership for too much time. However, looking at how these problems were tackled in the countries recently "liberated" by the US, I doubt the Cubans will be any better off with a US-sponsored regime change.
True indeed, but without approval from the European Parliament the Commission cannot do squat. That's how software patents were busted: the commission wanted them, the parliament told them to go fornicate themselves with a pitchfork (648 to 14, that's a pretty clear vote).
And yes, you can vote for the EU parliament.
Evolution is simple, it builds on two observations:
At this point, it is just a question of keeping in mind that, by definition, those that will survive will be the fittest to, duh, survive. The reasoning is elegant and sound, and the hypotheses are fairly obvious to verify (there is no animal whose female stops reproducing after exactly two kids, and animals in nature get killed on a pretty routine basis).
Evolution is supported by a mountain of evidence so big you could make it round and call it a a planet. Thousands and thousands of paleontological excavations have yielded an obvious evolutionary sequence, with animals and plants gradually changing into each other. Evolution is a theory that is very easy to falsify: you only need to find a bunny in the Cretacean layer. Guess what, no one ever found neither the bunny nor any other equivalent inconsistency.
Nope. Science is not about questioning the status quo for the sake of questioning, but open-mindedness in questioning it when facts are found contradicting it. You can't just start saying that entropy in the universe decreases instead of increasing just because you can question the status quo. Well, you can, but you will likely treated like Granpa Simpson. You can say that if you find evidence contradicting the theory, or if you have an alternative (preferably simpler and/or more elegant) theory explaining the data.
Yeah right. Some religious nuts are contesting science because it contradicts their scripture, which they by stupid blind faith believe to be infallible, and they would be skeptics and true to the spirit of science? Or are you thinking of those lawyers in the White House rewriting the scientific reports of climatologists? Or pseudo-scientists like Bjørn Lomborg, who make a job of faking statistics in fields they know nothing about, and then raking in the money from big business?
It is alright. But before questioning, you have to RTFM.
Right, the solution is not to study and understand science, the solution is to get scientists back in line. Sounds an awful lot like Lysenkoism.
Cheers,
an arrogant, full-of-shit scientist.
Statoil has been pumping CO2 underground in the Sleipner field off the coast of Norway for a few years now. You have to keep in mind that, at those pressures, CO2 becomes a liquid; but, even as a gas, you are putting CO2 in underground pockets that have a proven record of holding gas and hydrocarbons for millions of years: that's the safest place on earth.
As an energy engineer with a specialization in petroleum, my opinion is that of course we should pursue better and cleaner energy sources (be it wind, solar, or the best of them all energy conservation—yes it's an energy source) but as long as we are stuck with the present system we have to live with it, and the best thing we can do with the excess carbon is to put it where it came from in the first place.
Of course, if earthquakes could fracture reservoirs so that gas would escape to the surface they would have done it already in the past millions of years. If we find gas or oil (which almost always has a gas cap anyway) in a reservoir, it means it could not escape for geological times. That's a storage as safe as they come.
No, he deserted , and that just days before the end of the war when the army was in disarray and everybody was doing that. That was just out of self-preservation, not opposition to the Nazi regime.
Some people, at the risk of their lives, defected. He stayed in the system. Many others did, like Nobel laureate Günther Grass, but Grass lived an entire life of anti-fascist political activity afterwards. Another Nobel laureate, Dario Fo, was drafted but defected at the first occasion to join the resistance. Note that Fo was born in 1927, less than one month before Benedict XVI, and Grass is only six months older.
And anyway, the point was to point the irony with the six-million figure indicated by the parent post, when Ratzinger was among those that helped establish that tally.
They are not allowed to torture people anymore with the comfy chair, but their main activity is still censorship and repression of free thought within the Church. He could have chosen to be a missionary like Mother Theresa, but preferred the activity of a censoring bureaucrat.
Man, I am Italian and I wish it were like that. He has far more authority in the country than politicians. He says what he wants, and politicians usually give it to him because too few dare to tell him to mind his business, even though the separation of state and church should be a principle in the agreements the Italian state has with the Vatican. Partly it's because being "catholic", over here, is like being "patriotic" in the US. He is currently attacking the Italian abortion law: instead of simply telling catholics not to have abortions, he wants to make it illegal for everybody. Some people still remember how it was before the abortion law: double as many abortions and all performed by untrained, shady figures, resulting in women dying every year.
I probably did not finish the thought in my original post. It is not just that the pope is actually dressed in clothes that would cover significant charity projects and probably save hundreds of lives from starvation, the Church as a whole is actually a quite greedy parasite. They get about 0.8% of the Italian income tax and all their activities (including the for-profit ones) are tax-exempt, which in the last 20 years has allowed them to amass a fortune. Weren't these the guys who should preach poverty?
You know you have won the argument when your adversaries denigrate you by claiming you are just like them.
Not just any pope either, it was Boniface VIII. Dante hated him and destined him to his hell for simony (with the other damned asking "Is Boniface here yet?"). Since Dante's Inferno is the most read of the three books of the Commedia and compulsory reading for high-school students in Italy, pretty much every Italian connects Boniface VII with corruption, greed, hypocrisy and lust for power. Which brings us back to the current pope...
You are obviously aware that the Pope served in the Wehrmacht, his previous employment was as head of the Inquisition (which did in fact kill a few people in its heyday), forbids the use of condoms and family planning resulting in disease and famine, goes around dressed in gold (that's the first vice-boss who dresses better than the boss), that through history the catholic church has in fact persecuted scientists like Galileo, whose trial the current Pope considered "fair", and that exact quotation was the cause for the initial protest, aren't you?
Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Fourty percent of people know that.
The death penalty is not a deterrent for anything. There are some pretty draconian laws for capital punishment for street crimes in the US, but it's not like those US states are safer than Canada because of that.
Corruption is deterred by transparency, street crime by welfare, equal opportunities and affirmative action, but the death penalty is a so much more spectacular way of convincing voters you are doing something about it when you are actually not.
If I had been the guy's lawyer, the first thing I would have argued is that since the evidence was not uncovered by a sworn police officer, it could have been planted. What if this guy was a rude on the clerk, who was a vindictive bastard and decided to frame him? Or maybe a jolly clerk may have decided to pull a prank that went out of control when someone in the shop contacted the police ("hey Jimbo! this guy's name is Sodomsky, guess what I found on his drive!").
Yes, the courts could have checked the last-modified filestat, but that can be tampered too.
It would be interesting to see your source about this. The claim on OpenOffice.org Writer may be credible, but KWord (I suppose you meant that by KWrite, since KWrite is a very basic text editor) is way faster and snappier than MS Word (fine, it has also less features and all, but it is faster to load), and I am not going to believe your claim without data to support it.
Not sure about GEdit, but Notepad is almost featureless and has not changed in a decade or so. It has no code highlighting, no handling of different line endings, no support for different encodings, no tab handling, no plugin framework, no multi-file mode, and in fact its only feature is a search feature without regular expressions. Of course it's going to be fast. For that sake "Hello world" is even faster. I do most of my programming in Kate and I am very happy with that. Notepad may be faster, but it does not do what a text editor is supposed to do in order to be useful.
D'oh, it would be helpful to know which kind of patch we are talking about. Is that security? If so, how critical? Is that a theoretical case, or a gaping hole that is a dead giveaway to any script kiddie? Is the problem just annoying or mission-critical? Is that going to be used in a network? As a server service? On which platform? If it is a new feature, does it require re-engineering of the code base, or is it a drop-in feature you can be over with in half an hour?
Most importantly, is your code base well-architectured, or is it a filthy can of worms you cannot possibly modify without breaking something?
In my (tiny-sized) company, if the boss or other users of our in-house software need new features or a bug fixed, I have the habit of listening first to requirements and estimating time-to-delivery later, and I have a hunch most developers do just that. Sometimes it's half an hour, sometimes it takes three months. Last estimate I gave was "anything between two weeks and six months", when the boss gave me some very vague description of the next package we are to develop.
What happens if you have a joint in the Dutch module and some jolly fellow pushes you over in the Singapore module? Do you get spaced?
Ok, that's an interesting point. IANAL either, but the highlighted part in the post you link to seems to be superfluous: it says that:
Whereas the previous sentence read:I do not know whether this is azzeccagarbugli-speak, but it looks like the first sentence already specifies that all writing and publishing is covered, without any specification on whether it is for- or no-profit; the second part seems to be superficial. Then again, it is a lousy law draft.
Anyway, I do not believe this is relevant: the law has not yet been passed, not even discussed in Parliament in fact, so they only have to change article 5, and any problem with the Constitution is over; yet, registration is still required from anyone who has a website.
Fortunately, with all the noise that it made, this draft has the chances of a paper cat chasing an asbestos rat through hell of becoming a law.
Article 5 of the proposal defines "publishing activity" as production, distribution and collecting advertisement revenue. Did you mean article 6, the one that makes it compulsory for anyone with a "publishing activity" to register?
As for the Constitution articles, let's flesh them out one by one:
So, again, I do not see what is directly unconstitutional about this law proposal. Of course, my opinion is that this means there is a problem in the Constitution, not that the proposal is fine. Feel free to elaborate.
No you don't, you have only been skimming the article headings, as your post proves. If it were not for the fact that you can write English, I would suspect you were a shill from some think-tank close to UDEUR, posting from a dark and moist dungeon or something like that. A pointer in that direction is that your account was created specifically for this thread, but let's not be too much of a conspiracy theorist for today.
I'll benevolently put aside the fact that I did nowhere say the law was already enforced, indeed I explicitly wrote "proposed law" in the first line; but, even so, am I allowed to cry foul only when the law is actually passed? Am I supposed to stand idle until politicians are finished enacting racial laws, collecting bribes, selling weapons to dictators?
Do'h, 'cause, dude, that's the part under scrutiny that's making all this noise. Ever heard the word "focus"?
Oh, now you convinced me. Right, why would ever a politician lie when he is caught red-handed?
I wonder whether you are actually reading what you are writing. The article you mention basically says that the government-appointed Authority of Communications has discretionary powers to decide where the gun is actually going to be aimed. It is placing a ludicrously large power in a body separated by three degrees from the people (authority -> government -> parliament -> people).
Ahem, you know the Intahrweb? It's kind of global. Any Web page has at least "national dimensions".
What's the point with this summary of article headings you make here? The point of content are articles 2 and 6, it is the fact that non-commercial sites are subject to registration just like nation-wide newspapers. The text is quite clear about that, there is no distinction whatsoever.
No, of course it was just a mistake. Why would they ever think of anything like that, especially after blogs have started appearing all over the place, not just Grillo's? An odd coincidence indeed.
I wish I could believe that. The Constitution explicitly forbids financing private schools in article 33, yet private schools are financed using some creative accountability, such as calculating the savings to public school when a kid goes to private school. Anyway, which article of the Constitution would this law violate? Article 21 says nothing about being free from a requirement of registration. This is the same system applied to newspapers, it's not illegal today. The point is not to prohibit blogs, which would never get through the Constitutional Court, the point is to make it difficult to open one, or to make it a liability if you do open one without having gone through the bureaucracy, or to open a loophole so that blogs may be closed for some administrative reason.
Hmm, I think I recall reading that Repubblica passed Corriere some months ago. The Wikipedia has only data from 2005, unfortunately.
The source of the information is not just Beppe Grillo's blog, since that redirects to this article by La Repubblica, the main Italian newspaper, and the text of the proposed law itself.
In the text of the proposed law, I read: (Art. 2:1)
This means, in brief, that any product with purpose of information, formation, diffusion and entertainment meant for publication is actually targeted by the law, with no exception for no-profit sites. You only need to be a provider of information to be required to register your activity (Art. 6:1). Mr. AlbertoP, you are talking out of your ass, and Mr. Levi in his interview is lying (or he's incompetent, or both).
Now, some background for you Americans about what is happening over in Italy: there is mounting dissatisfaction with the current political class, which is seen as highly corrupt and mostly busy with covering its ass. I voted for the current government (Prodi, centre-left), and there is no way I am going over to the other side (which would be Berlusconi's), but I am myself very dissatisfied with the current bipartisan climate, and it seems I am in good company. Last year the parliament passed a general pardon to solve an overpopulation problem in jails (you read right: too many criminals, let's put them back on the streets!) which caused a spike in crime rate; the actual reason for a pardon instead of building more jails was that the pardon covered also crimes committed by certain politicians. This, the fact that the government is more busy with infighting that with maintaining the promises given in their 280-page program presented at the last election, the personality of jackass-politician Clemente Mastella (who attended a mafioso's wedding and is now fittingly minister of Justice) and many other things caused a general discontent.
Enter Beppe Grillo. A well-known comedian with a history of getting banned and censored for jokes on politicians since the '80s, he started a blog a few years ago and, in the current climate, decided to organise a "Fuck-off day" ("Vaffanculo day", V-Day as in V for Vendetta), a series of national rallies all over Italy and abroad. 4-letter words aside, the idea was to gather signatures for some popular-initiative law proposals (no felons can run for office, two-term limit in parliament, and so on). About a million people participated, and 300,000 signatures were gathered (even on an Italian scale, this is quite a success).
Politicians got scared and started to attack Grillo almost in unison; this law is an effort to silence Grillo and anybody who would take his place.
For the good news: infrastructure minister Antonio Di Pietro (yes, I voted for his party and I'm damn happy I did) said that if this law proposal is not retired he's torpedoing the government and forcing new elections. Nothing straightens out politicians like the threat to lose their post... Grazie Tonino!
One day, people will realise that this sentence belongs in the same league of:
Market is powered by greed. Greed may improve the economy, but if you think greed is going to do any good to democracy, well you're in for a surprise.
It's supposed to sound like a guy with the name and surname of the guy the HR gauleiter intended to hire to begin with, in order to repay some favour or because he had informally been given the task by some higher-up who needed his stupid son to finally get a job.
Just because they advertise the position does not mean they have not yet decided whom they are going to hire; it might well be a charade to fill a certain quota of interviews, so the hiring process looks clean. If they really had to come up with such a stupid justification, chances are you got bitten by something like that.