The EU is still new. They have members voting on ideals, and what is best for the people. That will change.
I dunno. The impression I've gotten from watching this EU software patents thing play out over the past year or so is that it's already happened.
The EU MPs vote on ideals. Sometimes. When their arms are twisted. Then the EC blatantly ignores them. Also, every once and a while the MPs will vote to explicitly cede a little more power to the EC.
The checks on the EC's power are diminishing with time, and it's the EC that's already stuffed with folks beholden to business interests.
However, except to the extent that US businesses are involved, I don't think it's fair to blame the US for this. The US didn't determine the structure of the EU, and issues of corruption are universal. The US could drop off the face of the earth, tomorrow, and your analysis of the weaknesses of representative democracy in the media age would still hold.
But... nor do I think it is appropriate to blame representative democracy per se; elected MPs have been the sole (if inconsistent) hedge against the unelected EC which has been trying to repeatedly hammer through software patents. The biggest failings of the EU government to serve the needs of its people (versus businses) appear to be in its least representative-democratic portions.
Out of curiousity, if it were up to you alone, what system of government would you choose for Europe?
Still, you may want to be careful of glossing over things quite as much as you did -- as that AC pointed out (rather ungraciously), the treatment in your original post appeared less than orthodox.
The importance of Joseph's geneology is that it made Jesus a patrilineal descendant of David by adoption -- note that the culture of the time placed equal weight on adoptive and biological fatherhood.
You are correct that it's not seen as simply a symbolic, metaphorical or "only spiritual" thing.
Being Catholic, I do have a few minor quibbles, though -- for example, the wafer is understood to become the flesh and blood of Christ immediately at consecration, not later at consumption.
Given this, it is understood that (under normal circumstances) the physical properties of the bread are conserved in the process. The use of bread and wine is also a requirement -- the glutin-free wafers are probably barely bread, but they still count.
Part of the miracle, if you like, is the discrepancy between the physical reality of the Eucharist and the physical accidents of the bread.
So, that is why Catholics bother with glutin-free wafers. You may or may not find that to be a satisfying answer (it probably seems crazier than the position you were trying to challenge), but there it is.
Basically that breakthrough is already here -- functional programming. Unix pipes, for example, are roughly equivalent to monads in functional languages. Since concurrency (and even order of execution) are largely unspecified in functional programs, the compiler has a tremendous amount of latitude to pursue parallelization.
Of course, we've not really seen widespread adoption of functional programming (as done in Haskell, Erlang, etc) because most programmers haven't been trained that way, and it's only in recent years that practical tools like monads (and more recently arrows) have been well-understood or available.
Also, not all algorithms are really very parallelizable.
And furthermore, the prepackaging ensures that large groups of works have compatible licenses (not all of the CC licenses are compatible with one another, but that's understood and intentional).
Apple would never go for that -- their thing is high quality through end-to-end integration. Which is exactly what they'd lose by switching to OS X as a layer atop windows.
Put Windows between OS X and the hardware, and introduce a jungle of non-standardized (relative to the limited selection of the Apple lines) hardware, and they lose everything. They'd just become another software vendor.
They have to keep their feet planted in hardware. Expect the Apple x86 machines to differ from their PPC machines only in CPU and chipset.
By the way, they've always used a compatability layer for their iTunes port. If they'd wanted to go the software vendor route they could have done so long, long ago.
The issue seems to be that while the PPC line is (maybe) better than Intel now, IBM's losing interest in the plain PPC line (in favor of Cell etc -- revenue from Apple is a drop in the bucket by comparison), so it's becoming a dead end.
IBM has still not come out with laptop-appropriate G5s, for example.
I think Jobs expects Intel to soundly overtake PPC just because the PPC line (at least the flavors that are of interest to Apple) has peaked.
I tried once. The problem is that all of the labeling services SUCK. And you're kinda forced to use one of them. If you just make up your own labels it won't do anyone any good.
So, PICS, or rating.txt or whatever, whoever standardises the labeling schemas needs to make working with them a non-sanity-draining experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just Ham radio, also potentially emergency, aircraft, and military frequencies.
I'm really rather at a loss to describe how unremittingly STUPID an idea BPL is...
I dunno. The impression I've gotten from watching this EU software patents thing play out over the past year or so is that it's already happened.
The EU MPs vote on ideals. Sometimes. When their arms are twisted. Then the EC blatantly ignores them. Also, every once and a while the MPs will vote to explicitly cede a little more power to the EC.
The checks on the EC's power are diminishing with time, and it's the EC that's already stuffed with folks beholden to business interests.
However, except to the extent that US businesses are involved, I don't think it's fair to blame the US for this. The US didn't determine the structure of the EU, and issues of corruption are universal. The US could drop off the face of the earth, tomorrow, and your analysis of the weaknesses of representative democracy in the media age would still hold.
But ... nor do I think it is appropriate to blame representative democracy per se; elected MPs have been the sole (if inconsistent) hedge against the unelected EC which has been trying to repeatedly hammer through software patents. The biggest failings of the EU government to serve the needs of its people (versus businses) appear to be in its least representative-democratic portions.
Out of curiousity, if it were up to you alone, what system of government would you choose for Europe?
Is that a serious question?
Yeah.
Still, you may want to be careful of glossing over things quite as much as you did -- as that AC pointed out (rather ungraciously), the treatment in your original post appeared less than orthodox.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but any Christian knowingly involved in Moon's coronation as Returning Messiah would be guilty of apostacy.
The importance of Joseph's geneology is that it made Jesus a patrilineal descendant of David by adoption -- note that the culture of the time placed equal weight on adoptive and biological fatherhood.
You are correct that it's not seen as simply a symbolic, metaphorical or "only spiritual" thing.
Being Catholic, I do have a few minor quibbles, though -- for example, the wafer is understood to become the flesh and blood of Christ immediately at consecration, not later at consumption.
Given this, it is understood that (under normal circumstances) the physical properties of the bread are conserved in the process. The use of bread and wine is also a requirement -- the glutin-free wafers are probably barely bread, but they still count.
Part of the miracle, if you like, is the discrepancy between the physical reality of the Eucharist and the physical accidents of the bread.
So, that is why Catholics bother with glutin-free wafers. You may or may not find that to be a satisfying answer (it probably seems crazier than the position you were trying to challenge), but there it is.
...you first?
If you're using the binary nvidia drivers, the only person who can fix the bug may well be nVidia.
Eh, it was a riff on the low-modded parent comment. I probably should have quoted it.
In Soviet Russia, Communists hate G-d?
Wasn't the war of 1812 when the US invaded Canada?
That's a legitimate question, which I don't know the answer to. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek really.
Would feudalism by any other name smell as sweet?
The speed of light in a vaccuum is the important limit for physics though.
The only reason they're not well-liked is that they're contributing to the current patent situation that is destroying our livelihoods. That's all.
I think they do pretty good otherwise.
Basically that breakthrough is already here -- functional programming. Unix pipes, for example, are roughly equivalent to monads in functional languages. Since concurrency (and even order of execution) are largely unspecified in functional programs, the compiler has a tremendous amount of latitude to pursue parallelization.
Of course, we've not really seen widespread adoption of functional programming (as done in Haskell, Erlang, etc) because most programmers haven't been trained that way, and it's only in recent years that practical tools like monads (and more recently arrows) have been well-understood or available.
Also, not all algorithms are really very parallelizable.
And furthermore, the prepackaging ensures that large groups of works have compatible licenses (not all of the CC licenses are compatible with one another, but that's understood and intentional).
I stand corrected. They're ditching OpenFirmware, but it's not clear in favor of what yet.
Apple would never go for that -- their thing is high quality through end-to-end integration. Which is exactly what they'd lose by switching to OS X as a layer atop windows.
Put Windows between OS X and the hardware, and introduce a jungle of non-standardized (relative to the limited selection of the Apple lines) hardware, and they lose everything. They'd just become another software vendor.
They have to keep their feet planted in hardware. Expect the Apple x86 machines to differ from their PPC machines only in CPU and chipset.
By the way, they've always used a compatability layer for their iTunes port. If they'd wanted to go the software vendor route they could have done so long, long ago.
They'll still be using OpenFirmware and the rest (versus a classic PC-style BIOS), so it's not exactly going to be a commodity PC architecture.
The issue seems to be that while the PPC line is (maybe) better than Intel now, IBM's losing interest in the plain PPC line (in favor of Cell etc -- revenue from Apple is a drop in the bucket by comparison), so it's becoming a dead end.
IBM has still not come out with laptop-appropriate G5s, for example.
I think Jobs expects Intel to soundly overtake PPC just because the PPC line (at least the flavors that are of interest to Apple) has peaked.
There's no real reason PS2 games couldn't use a USB keyboard -- the PS2 has USB ports. So it's probably just a matter of time.
I tried once. The problem is that all of the labeling services SUCK. And you're kinda forced to use one of them. If you just make up your own labels it won't do anyone any good.
So, PICS, or rating.txt or whatever, whoever standardises the labeling schemas needs to make working with them a non-sanity-draining experience.
I daresay whoever registers su.xxx first will be sitting on a veritable goldmine.
(well, maybe)