Islam demands that the entire world be brought to submission under god by any means necessary.
The thing is, you can't tell a Muslim what Islam is about. There are many examples of Muslim people living in peace with people from other religions. In Turkey, for example, over 99% of the population is Muslim, but there are lots of Catholics and Jews living there in peace.
To be a decent person as a muslim is to be a bad muslim, to threaten, burn, rape and kill nonbelievers as a muslim is to earn a guaranteed place in heaven.
By the same standard, to be a decent parent as a Christian is to be a bad Christian, because the Bible says (for example) "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death." (Leviticus 20:9). That's not an isolated quote: a lot of Leviticus is batshit insane, with rules about when it's acceptable to kill your slaves, and all sorts of crazy stuff. And that's just one chapter ("Book") of the Bible, in there's a lot more in other parts about killing fortune tellers, mediums, everyone in enemy nations and all sorts of other insane things.
Of course, it's insane to judge Christians based on these texts. Everyone knows that most Christians are not like that. But for some reason you're not willing to apply the same standard to Muslims.
It's not productive to judge religions based on what's written on their sacred books. What counts is behavior: if people behave in an unacceptable way, they have to be dealt with, regardless of religion.
As someone posted above, this not extremely recent, and did not result in any death, but it's relevant. Now, to be fair, that's not even close to the attack in Libya. I'm just showing that Christianity is not immune to extremely violent fanaticism.
You also have to consider the context in which this episode in Libya happened -- religion is certainly a factor, but not the only one, and probably not even the most important one. Libya had a bloody civil war a year ago, and is still very unstable; this same US consulate has been attacked a few months ago.
I mean, between believing that there is no God and believing that the only God is the invisible pink unicorn, it's obvious that the first one is the most daring dogma.
As I said, many Muslims disobey the Qur'an and Hadith by living peacefully with non-Muslims and treating them as equal.
How big of you to point out that not all Muslims are evil, and that the ones who reject their own religion can live in the civilized world.
The thing is, everyone picks and chooses from their sacred books. The Christians, for example, don't exactly follow these rules:
For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. - Exodus 35:2
For anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother; his blood is upon him. - Leviticus 20:9
(I could cite more, these are just the shortest ones).
Users of our paid, ad-free Pro Broadcasting service “NOTE: UPDATED CLARIFICATION” ‘and those free broadcasters who notify Ustream in advance they have copyrights permissions (Ustream’s messaging to our broadcaster community how this process works is inadequate. We are resolving this now)’ are automatically white listed to avoid situations like this and receive hands-on client support.
Imagine if, rather than paying for a venue, a famous band just decides to play for free in a local park. Well, good news is that the show is free. Bad news, if it rains there's no shelter organised, if people arrive to mow the grass in the park then show's over, and if the police decide its' too noisy the amps will get turned off with no notice.
That's one way to spin this. The polar opposite would be something like this:
A band didn't want to pay for a venue, so they went do play for free in a local park. A local Italian restaurant owner (which may or may not be connected to the mafia) sends word that it would be a shame if electricity went out during the performance, and for a small fee, they would be glad to look over things so that nothing bad happens. The band refuses to pay, and then the electricity goes out during the show.
Now, I'm not saying that's a good analogy, it's most certainly not. But neither is yours: a malfunctioning bot looking for copyright infringement and gratuitously shutting down a stream is in no way equivalent to rain in a park during a public performance -- just like it's not at all comparable to being harassed by the mafia.
Moreover, UStream has already said that they will gladly disable that "copyright infringement searching bot" for any free stream owner that informs them that they own the copyright of what's being streamed -- see the "UPDATED CLARIFICATION" here. This makes it even clearer that the situation here is nothing like your analogy.
In other words: it was a huge fuck up from UStream, they recognize it and are trying to fix it.
That's not how the electron spin works. When you're talking about the spin state of a single, non-entangled electron, the state "both up and down" is exactly the same as the state "up" in a direction perpendicular the original "up/down".
From what I understand, it's a technicality (which might be another reason to dislike patents, if you will):
1) to infringe that patent, you must infringe every element of claim 8
2) one of the elements of claim 8 describes distinguishing between one touch (to scroll) and two or more touches (the "pinch" gesture)
3) so, you CAN implement "pinch to zoom" without infringing this patent; all you have to do is (for example) make two touches scroll as well as "pinch to zoom"
There are over 200 music players on Freshmeat. Why? That's ridiculous.
I'd thing my response would have given a hint about that, but: it's because 200 people (or small groups of people) were interested in making a new music player, because it's fun. How is that bad for you? As I said before, forcing them to choose between improving "the one certified music player" and not writing free software at all would accomplish nothing except killing all their fun, and maybe preventing the (very rare, admittedly) creation of a great new software.
The FSF (and the BSDs) could quite easily release software by developers under their aegis once it was tested and audited.
The FSF and the BSDs don't make the majority of free software, and have no control over what most free software developers do.
What I am in favor of is somebody putting the brakes on this crazy clown car called software before it gets totally out of control. WE DON'T NEED ALL KINDS OF NEW SOFTWARE. We just need better, more refined software.
Again, a lot of people who write free software do it because it's fun, and they distribute it for all kinds of reasons; among them, the hope that it will be useful for someone. But no one has to use them, and if you read most free software licenses (GPL and BSD, for instance), you'll see clearly that they offer NO WARRANTY (yes, it's usually written in all caps, as you can see here, in section 15 and here in all versions listed).
Since you don't have to use this software, and it's free, and no one is being deceived about it, why is it important to you whether it's being written or not?
You seem to have a strange idea about what motivates people to write free software.
I'm a free software developer on my free time. I mostly work on my own projects, but I occasionally contribute random patches to large projects. I write free software for fun, mostly doing things I'm interested at the time. Most software I write have no bad bugs, probably because I write it very slowly, and because stuff I write tend to be very simple. But if I had to go out of my way to ensure that it's impossible for someone to use my program in an unexpected way and crash it, I simply wouldn't do it -- that would take all the fun out of it (of course, I'm more than happy to fix bugs, even when it's a chore, but that's very different than being paranoid about the code you write for fun). Or, more likely, I would keep the stuff I wrote to myself.
Now, one might argue that this applies only to volunteers, and there's a lot of people being paid to write free software. That's true, but there are two problems with discarding all work from volunteers. First, the price of writing certified-bug-free software (if that's even possible) is absolutely ridiculous -- if you don't believe me, you should see how much it costs to write software that controls aircraft, for example. That means that development would be severely affected (less projects, less new stuff, etc.). Secondly, most people being paid to write free software work in a relatively small number of large and well known projects. A typical Linux distribution has hundreds of programs that were completely written by volunteers -- sometimes someone employed by a distribution packages it in a way that plays nice with the organization of the rest of the system. Those contributions would simply vanish, and distributions would be severely affected.
That's why any regulation like what you're proposing would actually lower the quality and quantity of free software, not increase it.
If such a regulation passed, we'd see a lot more attention given to removing bugs, and a lot less attention given to creating new but probably useless features. Yes, I'm looking at both the Gnome3 and Win8 dev teams here.
If such a regulation passed, you wouldn't be able to look at the Gnome3 dev team at all, because it wouldn't exist anymore. As would most free software developers.
Put yourself in the position of Linus Torvalds when he started developing Linux, for instance. Do you think he would even start distributing it if he could be sued for it?
but that initial copy to learn things would no doubt be considered "plagiarism" (or at the very least copyright infringement)
There's a HUGE difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Plagiarism is when you copy someone's work (or even idea) and tell everyone it's your own original work. There's almost never justification for doing so.
On the other hand, there are many situations when it's justifiable and even desirable to infringe on someone else's copyright. That is so common that a limited form of copyright exception is provided by law ("fair use").
So, don't hide the giants when you're standing on their shoulders.
[...] but homosexuality is even illegal, punished up to the death penalty, in most countries with a majority Muslim population.
I think (hope) that most social left America would say that while every religion should be respected, mixing religion and state is terrible and must be avoided; and while Islam should be respected, no country (regardless of religion) should base its legal system in any religious text, be it the sermons in the Bible or Sharia law or whatever.
I agree that there's a lot of talk about accepting Islam and almost no talk about protecting Christianity, but you have to remember that Christianity is mostly accepted by default in American society, while there's a lot of stigma associated with being a Muslim in a lot of places.
Using floating point data types to store fiscal data is not so bad as long as you aren't running too close to the limits of precision.
That's terrible advice. Floating point numbers are not designed to be used for money, and don't have many properties you'd like to have when dealing with money. This means that if you do use floating point to store money values, you'll have to do a lot of work that would simply not exist if you used fixed point or integers.
For example: if you owe someone $3.60, is it enough to pay them $2.40 today and $1.20 tomorrow? With floating point, that's not trivial to answer, because it's not true that 2.4+1.2 >= 3.6.
Not really. Arithmetic is about the operations you do with numbers (addition, multiplication, etc.). Algebra (or rather, elementary algebra) is basically solving equations. The examples the GP gave are usually solved by using very simple elementary algebra and arithmetic: build an equation representing the problem, solve it by isolating the variable (algebra), and then calculate the numeric answer (arithmetic).
It's obviously an arbitrary definition, but there's actually a good reason to define 1 to not be prime.
No one really cares too much about the property of "being divisible by only 1 and itself" (the definition still thought in school, which includes 1). Primes are important because you can uniquely factor any integer greater than 1 into primes. If you define 1 as prime, then you have to exclude it from the "prime factors" in order to get a unique factorization.
TL;DR: if 1 is prime, then "being prime" is not exactly the property people care about.
Khan academy is used by teachers in the class room to help students. When used like that, Khan academy competes with lesson plan providers like Mathalicious.
You're talking about direct infringement, but that's not the only thing a trademark owner has to worry about. From Wikipedia:
In most cases, trademark dilution involves an unauthorized use of another's trademark on products that do not compete with, and have little connection with, those of the trademark owner. For example, a famous trademark used by one company to refer to hair care products might be diluted if another company began using a similar mark to refer to breakfast cereals or spark plugs.
If you only see the posts on Reddit's front page, you might get the impression that Reddit is really dumb. You'll also be missing a lot of good stuff.
I'll give an example: there was a story a while ago saying that a kid in Germany found an equation to solve a (pretty basic) open problem in classical mechanics. The discussion on slashdot had some good comments, a lot bickering about unrelated math stuff and the obligatory comments denouncing the American educational system (moderated +5 insightful, naturally).
On Reddit, this post on the "Math" sub-reddit (which sadly got nowhere near the front page) also generated a lot of inane comments, but also some really good stuff:
For example, vi (the editor) has this name because it originated as the "visual" mode of ex, a line-oriented (so non-visual) editor. So, even a rudimentary text-mode web browser would be considered "visual" when compared with FTP, for example.
The Model A will cost $25 and the Model B $35, plus local taxes.
and
Model A has been redesigned to have 256Mb RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port.
ends a comment (if inside a comment). This means that the first script tag (the one loading "jquery-1.9.0.js") is considered a comment in any non-IE browser.
The second script tag is preceded by
<!--anything><!-->
which opens and then immediately closes a comment (in non-IE browsers). So the second script tag will not be inside a comment.
Nothing, but wouldn't it be great if there was a way to use the same code in both places? XML Schema and the JSON schema proposal I linked before work like that -- a schema is used to validate documents and is at the same time readable as documentation for the document format.
half of the purpose of a schema -- being a human-readable documentation of the data format
That purpose can be achieved with English.
Sure, but then you have to write the schema AND document it. This can (and does) lead to documentation being out of sync with the code.
If you specifically don't want something Turing complete when processing XML, then why do XML fans use XSLT despite its being Turing complete?
XSTL is a completely different story; it's used to transform XML, not to validate it (which is what XML Schema does). For that, having the flexibility of a Turing-complete language is a good thing (that said, XSLT is still a pain in the ass to use, regardless of being Turing-complete).
Slashdot Mirror
Islam demands that the entire world be brought to submission under god by any means necessary.
The thing is, you can't tell a Muslim what Islam is about. There are many examples of Muslim people living in peace with people from other religions. In Turkey, for example, over 99% of the population is Muslim, but there are lots of Catholics and Jews living there in peace.
To be a decent person as a muslim is to be a bad muslim, to threaten, burn, rape and kill nonbelievers as a muslim is to earn a guaranteed place in heaven.
By the same standard, to be a decent parent as a Christian is to be a bad Christian, because the Bible says (for example) "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death." (Leviticus 20:9). That's not an isolated quote: a lot of Leviticus is batshit insane, with rules about when it's acceptable to kill your slaves, and all sorts of crazy stuff. And that's just one chapter ("Book") of the Bible, in there's a lot more in other parts about killing fortune tellers, mediums, everyone in enemy nations and all sorts of other insane things.
Of course, it's insane to judge Christians based on these texts. Everyone knows that most Christians are not like that. But for some reason you're not willing to apply the same standard to Muslims.
It's not productive to judge religions based on what's written on their sacred books. What counts is behavior: if people behave in an unacceptable way, they have to be dealt with, regardless of religion.
As someone posted above, this not extremely recent, and did not result in any death, but it's relevant. Now, to be fair, that's not even close to the attack in Libya. I'm just showing that Christianity is not immune to extremely violent fanaticism.
You also have to consider the context in which this episode in Libya happened -- religion is certainly a factor, but not the only one, and probably not even the most important one. Libya had a bloody civil war a year ago, and is still very unstable; this same US consulate has been attacked a few months ago.
Exactly.
I mean, between believing that there is no God and believing that the only God is the invisible pink unicorn, it's obvious that the first one is the most daring dogma.
As I said, many Muslims disobey the Qur'an and Hadith by living peacefully with non-Muslims and treating them as equal.
How big of you to point out that not all Muslims are evil, and that the ones who reject their own religion can live in the civilized world.
The thing is, everyone picks and chooses from their sacred books. The Christians, for example, don't exactly follow these rules:
(I could cite more, these are just the shortest ones).
There are no (repeat: NO) exceptions being built into these bots, just the "FLICK THE SWITCH NOW" code.
Where did you get this information? Because it completely contradicts what UStream said a few days ago:
Imagine if, rather than paying for a venue, a famous band just decides to play for free in a local park. Well, good news is that the show is free. Bad news, if it rains there's no shelter organised, if people arrive to mow the grass in the park then show's over, and if the police decide its' too noisy the amps will get turned off with no notice.
That's one way to spin this. The polar opposite would be something like this:
A band didn't want to pay for a venue, so they went do play for free in a local park. A local Italian restaurant owner (which may or may not be connected to the mafia) sends word that it would be a shame if electricity went out during the performance, and for a small fee, they would be glad to look over things so that nothing bad happens. The band refuses to pay, and then the electricity goes out during the show.
Now, I'm not saying that's a good analogy, it's most certainly not. But neither is yours: a malfunctioning bot looking for copyright infringement and gratuitously shutting down a stream is in no way equivalent to rain in a park during a public performance -- just like it's not at all comparable to being harassed by the mafia.
Moreover, UStream has already said that they will gladly disable that "copyright infringement searching bot" for any free stream owner that informs them that they own the copyright of what's being streamed -- see the "UPDATED CLARIFICATION" here. This makes it even clearer that the situation here is nothing like your analogy.
In other words: it was a huge fuck up from UStream, they recognize it and are trying to fix it.
That's not how the electron spin works. When you're talking about the spin state of a single, non-entangled electron, the state "both up and down" is exactly the same as the state "up" in a direction perpendicular the original "up/down".
From what I understand, it's a technicality (which might be another reason to dislike patents, if you will):
There are over 200 music players on Freshmeat. Why? That's ridiculous.
I'd thing my response would have given a hint about that, but: it's because 200 people (or small groups of people) were interested in making a new music player, because it's fun. How is that bad for you? As I said before, forcing them to choose between improving "the one certified music player" and not writing free software at all would accomplish nothing except killing all their fun, and maybe preventing the (very rare, admittedly) creation of a great new software.
The FSF (and the BSDs) could quite easily release software by developers under their aegis once it was tested and audited.
The FSF and the BSDs don't make the majority of free software, and have no control over what most free software developers do.
What I am in favor of is somebody putting the brakes on this crazy clown car called software before it gets totally out of control. WE DON'T NEED ALL KINDS OF NEW SOFTWARE. We just need better, more refined software.
Again, a lot of people who write free software do it because it's fun, and they distribute it for all kinds of reasons; among them, the hope that it will be useful for someone. But no one has to use them, and if you read most free software licenses (GPL and BSD, for instance), you'll see clearly that they offer NO WARRANTY (yes, it's usually written in all caps, as you can see here, in section 15 and here in all versions listed).
Since you don't have to use this software, and it's free, and no one is being deceived about it, why is it important to you whether it's being written or not?
You seem to have a strange idea about what motivates people to write free software.
I'm a free software developer on my free time. I mostly work on my own projects, but I occasionally contribute random patches to large projects. I write free software for fun, mostly doing things I'm interested at the time. Most software I write have no bad bugs, probably because I write it very slowly, and because stuff I write tend to be very simple. But if I had to go out of my way to ensure that it's impossible for someone to use my program in an unexpected way and crash it, I simply wouldn't do it -- that would take all the fun out of it (of course, I'm more than happy to fix bugs, even when it's a chore, but that's very different than being paranoid about the code you write for fun). Or, more likely, I would keep the stuff I wrote to myself.
Now, one might argue that this applies only to volunteers, and there's a lot of people being paid to write free software. That's true, but there are two problems with discarding all work from volunteers. First, the price of writing certified-bug-free software (if that's even possible) is absolutely ridiculous -- if you don't believe me, you should see how much it costs to write software that controls aircraft, for example. That means that development would be severely affected (less projects, less new stuff, etc.). Secondly, most people being paid to write free software work in a relatively small number of large and well known projects. A typical Linux distribution has hundreds of programs that were completely written by volunteers -- sometimes someone employed by a distribution packages it in a way that plays nice with the organization of the rest of the system. Those contributions would simply vanish, and distributions would be severely affected.
That's why any regulation like what you're proposing would actually lower the quality and quantity of free software, not increase it.
If such a regulation passed, we'd see a lot more attention given to removing bugs, and a lot less attention given to creating new but probably useless features. Yes, I'm looking at both the Gnome3 and Win8 dev teams here.
If such a regulation passed, you wouldn't be able to look at the Gnome3 dev team at all, because it wouldn't exist anymore. As would most free software developers.
Put yourself in the position of Linus Torvalds when he started developing Linux, for instance. Do you think he would even start distributing it if he could be sued for it?
but that initial copy to learn things would no doubt be considered "plagiarism" (or at the very least copyright infringement)
There's a HUGE difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Plagiarism is when you copy someone's work (or even idea) and tell everyone it's your own original work. There's almost never justification for doing so.
On the other hand, there are many situations when it's justifiable and even desirable to infringe on someone else's copyright. That is so common that a limited form of copyright exception is provided by law ("fair use").
So, don't hide the giants when you're standing on their shoulders.
[...] but homosexuality is even illegal, punished up to the death penalty, in most countries with a majority Muslim population.
I think (hope) that most social left America would say that while every religion should be respected, mixing religion and state is terrible and must be avoided; and while Islam should be respected, no country (regardless of religion) should base its legal system in any religious text, be it the sermons in the Bible or Sharia law or whatever.
I agree that there's a lot of talk about accepting Islam and almost no talk about protecting Christianity, but you have to remember that Christianity is mostly accepted by default in American society, while there's a lot of stigma associated with being a Muslim in a lot of places.
Using floating point data types to store fiscal data is not so bad as long as you aren't running too close to the limits of precision.
That's terrible advice. Floating point numbers are not designed to be used for money, and don't have many properties you'd like to have when dealing with money. This means that if you do use floating point to store money values, you'll have to do a lot of work that would simply not exist if you used fixed point or integers.
For example: if you owe someone $3.60, is it enough to pay them $2.40 today and $1.20 tomorrow? With floating point, that's not trivial to answer, because it's not true that 2.4+1.2 >= 3.6.
Not really. Arithmetic is about the operations you do with numbers (addition, multiplication, etc.). Algebra (or rather, elementary algebra) is basically solving equations. The examples the GP gave are usually solved by using very simple elementary algebra and arithmetic: build an equation representing the problem, solve it by isolating the variable (algebra), and then calculate the numeric answer (arithmetic).
It's obviously an arbitrary definition, but there's actually a good reason to define 1 to not be prime.
No one really cares too much about the property of "being divisible by only 1 and itself" (the definition still thought in school, which includes 1). Primes are important because you can uniquely factor any integer greater than 1 into primes. If you define 1 as prime, then you have to exclude it from the "prime factors" in order to get a unique factorization.
TL;DR: if 1 is prime, then "being prime" is not exactly the property people care about.
Khan academy is used by teachers in the class room to help students. When used like that, Khan academy competes with lesson plan providers like Mathalicious.
Tom Lehrer's song about new math
You're talking about direct infringement, but that's not the only thing a trademark owner has to worry about. From Wikipedia:
If you only see the posts on Reddit's front page, you might get the impression that Reddit is really dumb. You'll also be missing a lot of good stuff.
I'll give an example: there was a story a while ago saying that a kid in Germany found an equation to solve a (pretty basic) open problem in classical mechanics. The discussion on slashdot had some good comments, a lot bickering about unrelated math stuff and the obligatory comments denouncing the American educational system (moderated +5 insightful, naturally).
On Reddit, this post on the "Math" sub-reddit (which sadly got nowhere near the front page) also generated a lot of inane comments, but also some really good stuff:
Yes, for some meaning of "visual".
For example, vi (the editor) has this name because it originated as the "visual" mode of ex, a line-oriented (so non-visual) editor. So, even a rudimentary text-mode web browser would be considered "visual" when compared with FTP, for example.
Check the FAQ:
The Model A will cost $25 and the Model B $35, plus local taxes.
and
Model A has been redesigned to have 256Mb RAM, one USB port and no Ethernet (network connection). Model B has 256Mb RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port.
Yes. For any non-IE browser,
<!--anything>
starts a comment, and
<anything-->
ends a comment (if inside a comment). This means that the first script tag (the one loading "jquery-1.9.0.js") is considered a comment in any non-IE browser.
The second script tag is preceded by
<!--anything><!-->
which opens and then immediately closes a comment (in non-IE browsers). So the second script tag will not be inside a comment.
Nothing, but wouldn't it be great if there was a way to use the same code in both places? XML Schema and the JSON schema proposal I linked before work like that -- a schema is used to validate documents and is at the same time readable as documentation for the document format.
half of the purpose of a schema -- being a human-readable documentation of the data format
That purpose can be achieved with English.
Sure, but then you have to write the schema AND document it. This can (and does) lead to documentation being out of sync with the code.
If you specifically don't want something Turing complete when processing XML, then why do XML fans use XSLT despite its being Turing complete?
XSTL is a completely different story; it's used to transform XML, not to validate it (which is what XML Schema does). For that, having the flexibility of a Turing-complete language is a good thing (that said, XSLT is still a pain in the ass to use, regardless of being Turing-complete).