Again, you do not understand. In the "real world" of today, governments give corporations the green light to do whatever they want with no accountability to the citizen. So they pollute and wreck the environment until citizens start screaming LOUDLY to the GOVERNMENT, and then the government may or may not do something. It's all backwards. And even if the government does something, the individuals responsible are never held directly responsible. Has anyone at Phillip Morris ever gone to jail for producing a product that has killed countless? Government spends all its time going after the small-fry drug pushers on the street and slams them hard for selling product that may kill a few people, but big corporations like Philip Morris still sells their killer product to many the world over and that's perfectly OK.
So your answer is to take away the government's ability to do anything about this, aside from prosecuting individuals for individual crimes (note: no one at Philip Morris has committed a crime in selling their product), and simply rely on the magical free market to grant people the ability to fix this problem by voting with their wallets (something that we're perfectly capable of doing right now, and yet still people the world over are buying cigarettes, smoking, getting cancer, and dying)? Do you not see how ridiculous that is?
Of course modern democracy is flawed. Of course voting seems to accomplish little. Of course corporations have too much power. Of course individuals, particularly in corporations, are not held accountable for their actions enough. And of course ridiculous things like the "War On Drugs" are causing more problems than they solve, and completely missing the real problems. We're in agreement on that.
I just don't buy the ridiculous libertarian notion that if we just leave it all alone and let the market rule, with people "voting with their wallets" — something that far too few can be bothered to do in this day and age — that everything will be just perfect.
So corporations are also free as long as they do no harm to individuals.
So if, for example, a corporation is harming individuals by, say, polluting the environment those individuals live in, what exactly is supposed to prevent this? Consumers "voting" with their wallets? You do realize that, unlike voting with ballots, voting with wallets is a form of "democracy" that not everyone can afford, right? Therefore what you're talking about, from the consumer perspective, is really freedom for those who can afford it. As for those who can't afford to vote with their wallets, you want to diminish the effect of voting with their ballots.
So corporations who violate these principles will find themselves out of business before long.
Right. That works really well. That's why we have nothing but entirely ethical corporations in the world. After all, any corporation who does anything unethical (ie. harming the environment, harming workers, etc) will be "voted" into nonexistence by all the ethical consumers.
Modern libertarianism is mostly a wonderful idea combined with utopian ideology that fails the "Real World Test", spurred on by the false dichotomy of minimalist, impotent, barely-recognizable government vs. enormous, bloated, control-everything-you-ever-do government.
But it is true that the Party of a Republican in the news tends to be mentioned in the summary, while the Party of a Democrat in the news tends to be quietly ignored in the summary.
Someone (maybe it was you, I dunno) made a similar comment in an article a while back. Someone else came along and posted many links to Slashdot summaries which explicitly mentioned the offending individuals as Democrats, and even posted links to a few summaries that failed to mention that the offending individuals were Republicans.
I'm not going to do the same research that person did — if you don't want to believe me, that's fine. Nevertheless, it happens both ways. Sometimes it may be because the submitter has an agenda, other times it may just be that the submitter didn't really care what party was involved and simply neglected to mention it. Either way, it's no conspiracy.
In this case, I don't think the party is relevant, so I would have written the summary the same way. What matters here is that the use of voting machines is just begging for abuse, and now we have an example of it actually happening. Democracy is being destroyed by these machines. That's the real story.
Actually, I just had a thought. Since people always want to know which party is the "bad guy" in the story, maybe leaving the party affiliations out of the summary is a sneaky way for Slashdot contributors and editors to get the rest of us to actually RTFA.
Because the first is going to (whether your think it or not, it's coming) mandate that the third operate 100% contrary to its beliefs and perform marriages to homosexuals.
That's complete and utter horseshit. The state has never, ever mandated that churches perform marriage according to its definition of marriage. The state has always stayed out of church sacraments. Separation of church and state works both ways.
The example I gave in another post is relevant here. I quote myself: "Currently, the legal definition of marriage allows a Jew to marry a non-Jew. It also allows divorced people to re-marry. However, Jewish synagogues will typically not perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Similarly, Catholic churches do not perform marriages for people who have been divorced. The government has never, ever stepped in and tried to force this issue on either institution. It is not going to start forcing churches to marry homosexuals simply because the legal definition allows it."
You want a world where 1/3 of the parties are shafted. I want a world where 3/3 win.
Wrong. What you've described is a world where 2/3 win. What I described is a world where 3/3 win.
You see, I want the legal benefits of a civil marriage. You want to take that away from me (and everyone else) and allow only the personal and religious aspects to prevail.
What I want is for all three aspects to exist for everyone who chooses any one, two, or three of them. I want a civil contract available to those who want the benefits of a legal marriage. I want a personal commitment available to those who want one. And I want a religious sacrament available to those who want that.
The only question that remains is over the use of the word "marriage", as opposed to terms like "civil union". The discussion frequently focuses on the incorrect belief that marriage started in the church, so the word should stay there. My point was that marriage actually started as a civil contract, so if anyone gets to "keep" the word, it should be the state. Of course, I was mostly trying to make a point by turning the original poster's argument against them.
If marriage is REMOVED from government it is by default in the hands of INDIVIDUALS.
Pay attention to the question that you were responding to. You even quoted it. The question was why marriage should "belong" to the church. You responded by saying that it should be taken away from the government so that it belongs to everybody. You answered a different question. I agree that it should belong to everybody. That's my point. It should not belong to the church. However, the state must still be involved for those who want the legal benefits of marriage.
Whether the state has any involvement in marriage or not, the personal aspect of it that you and I both want still remains. Anyone can, at any time, have a personal ceremony and pledge their commitment to each other. They can then call themselves married if they want. Neither the church nor the state will recognize that marriage, but so what? If you want either to recognize it, you have to go to that institution and go through their process to get it recognized. Each institution has its own requirements for that to occur. The state's requirements should not be influenced by church teachings, and the church's requirements should not be influenced by the state's definition. So far, in reality, the state does stay out of the church's requirements, but the church does not stay out of the state's requirements. That needs to stop. Now.
And we, of course, know everything about biochemistry...
No, but we do know quite a bit.
...and can prove that the chemical pathways involved in his cure are in no way related to the brown recluse spider toxin.
No, but we can apply a little logic and a liberal dose of Occam's Razor and come to a reasonable conclusion. "Magical spider bite cures paralysis" is not that reasonable conclusion.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
You need a piece of paper from the government to endorse a mutual personal commitment?
If I want the state to recognize it and to confer all of the associated rights, yes.
I wasn't stating that marriage is only a personal commitment. I was merely countering the previous poster's claim that "everyone else on the planet" views marriage as a religious matter. I see it as having three elements: personal commitment, legal status, and religious significance. The first element always applies, while the second and third are optional.
However, it may be expedient to let them pretend they do and change the legal definition to "civil union" or some such phrase.
This is the one area where I find myself disagreeing with many people who otherwise agree with me on the general principle. You see, the word "marriage" is a powerful word. It has enormous meaning to a lot of people. Therefore, I believe it should be available to the most people. This is accomplished by keeping the word within the civil realm, where it applies to everyone, rather than within the religious realm, where it only applies to the religious. If the religious want a limited variation on the idea, let them come up with a separate term for it.
No, what he is saying is that the government cannot force a church to perform religious rites on someone they do not want to. Separation of Church and State was one of the founding principles of the United States. Unfortunately, this principle was violated when they allowed the legal and religious definitions of "marriage" to co-mingle.
Let's be absolutely clear here. Legal definitions of marriage have absolutely nothing to do with a church's definition of marriage, and in no way forces the churches to do anything they don't want to do. If the legal definition of marriage allows gay couples to marry, no church will be forced to perform a gay marriage, ever.
Currently, the legal definition of marriage allows a Jew to marry a non-Jew. It also allows divorced people to re-marry. However, Jewish synagogues will typically not perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Similarly, Catholic churches do not perform marriages for people who have been divorced.
The government has never, ever stepped in and tried to force this issue on either institution. It is not going to start forcing churches to marry homosexuals simply because the legal definition allows it.
The churches retain the right to decide which people they want to perform religious ceremonies on, and can refuse to perform them on anyone they see fit.
Absolutely. And, if we kept "marriage" in its original place as a civil institution, and let churches have their own variation on the theme ("spiritual unions"), then this would further ensure that right.
Excuse me, but who said it had to be between individuals or only two entities.
If someone wants to 'marry' their cat, that's their own damned business and none of my own.
First, as I pointed out to another poster, the number "two" in my comment was more a matter of habit. I'm not saying it's necessary to restrict it to two. I do think the idea of marrying your cat is a bit ridiculous, since we can't actually be sure that your cat wants to marry you. I do think informed consent is necessary for a marriage to be worth anything.
I tend to agree that marriage should really be more of a personal thing than anything else. But, as long as there are legal implications to marriage (tax issues, property rights, etc), I do think there needs to be government involvement.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
Why two, rather than N?
Why indeed. It's a valid point. I suppose I really only typed "two" out of habit. Logically, I don't know if there's a reason to limit it to two.
I'm sorry, this whole "marriage belongs to the church and the rest of you can fuck off" idea is just complete bullshit. I say keep marriage as a civil institution, open to all -- gay, straight, theist, atheist, black, white, whatever -- and let churches perform their own "spiritual unions" instead.
Do you realize that you and the parent post actually want the exact same thing, but choose to use opposite terminology?
Yup. That was partially my point. I was trying to turn the previous poster's argument against him by simply swapping his revisionist view of history for a real view of history.
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not) -- the civil institution should be called a "civil union," specifically to avoid those controversial connotations. Anyone who's Hell-bent on getting something called a "marriage" is still free to take their "civil union license" to a priest instead of a judge.
Except that you're basically defaulting to having the word "marriage" belong to the churches. The word is extremely meaningful to many people — not just religious people — and therefore it should default to the institution that is relevant to everyone, including those who don't associate with a church.
What it really comes down to is this: marriage has three elements: legal (ie. marriage certificate and associate rights), personal (ie. romantic love), and spiritual (ie. religious sacrament). The first two (theoretically, at least) apply to all marriages. The third does not. So why should the arbiter of the third be the "owner" of the institution?
I think both of you are aiming for the same result, which is to remove the government's ability to restrict marriage, you're just disagreeing on which side (religion or government) gets to keep the term "marriage".
You're exactly right. My point is more that the people who insist on demanding that the church get to "keep" the word "marriage" (and I've encountered many of them) are arguing based on a revisionist view of history, and if real history is used instead, their argument actually works against them.
This whole "gay marriage mess" is a side effect of the fact that the US Government has
decided to meddle in something that EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET views as a primarily
religious matter.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
Of course, neither that, nor your religious idea, have anything to do with the origins of marriage. It was a civil institution first. Basically, it existed to secure property rights and guarantee bloodlines. Then, somewhere along the way, people got it into their heads that if they're going to marry, they should marry someone they actually, you know, kind of like. So the idea of romantic love got injected into the mix. Then, further on down the road, the churches decided that they should have a role in all of this, so they injected a religious element to it. Then, much later on, people like you started thinking that marriage is entirely a religious institution, and that the rest of us (gays, atheists, etc) should just stay away from "your" sacrament.
Let the Pope decide what a sacrament should be and keep any hint of sacrament out of what the government does.
Oh, so now you want to prevent non-Catholics from getting married, too?
I'm sorry, this whole "marriage belongs to the church and the rest of you can fuck off" idea is just complete bullshit. I say keep marriage as a civil institution, open to all — gay, straight, theist, atheist, black, white, whatever — and let churches perform their own "spiritual unions" instead.
Government really should not be involved with religious sacraments and marriage is a religious sacrament.
Actually, marriage existed as a civil institution long before religion stuck its nose into it.
Perhaps what would be better would be for marriage to remain in the civil realm, thus avoiding any religious influence on who can marry whom, and instead allow religious institutes to perform "spiritual unions".
While free games are certainly an option, I find it very difficult to believe that you are going to have a team of 10 developers working 5 days a week, for nothing to develop a game.
Who said anything about not paying developers? The article is about companies finding a different way to make money besides selling the game. They're still game companies, and they still pay their employees.
Never before coming to Slashdot have I seen the two mixed up so frequently.
I've been seeing this mistake for years. In the 80's, on BBSes, people were constantly using that misspelling. This has continued through the 90's and the 00's on the intarweb. It's nothing new, and it's certainly not limited to Slashdot.
Loose and lose don't even sound the same.
The problem is that the word "lose" is spelled in a rather odd way. How often in the English language does the letter "o" followed by a consonant and then an "e" produce a long "u" sound? I mean, it's pronounced like "muse", but spelled like "dose". This confuses people, so they double up the "o" in order to give it a long "u" sound, similar to the sound in "choose".
It was vulnerable also, they got the patch out quicker.
Well, technically it was a different problem that just happened to be found in similar code. So, yes, it was also vulerable, just not vulnerable to the same problem.
"The Foxit and Adobe bugs are unrelated, however, except for the fact that they are both in the code that parses JBIG2 images, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer at Secunia AsP, the Danish company that reported the flaw to Foxit. "It is a completely different vulnerability related to JBIG2," Kristensen said in an e-mail Monday."
Reliability is not the problem. A private company handling documents is.... If they decide to buy the apps from Google AND they are open source, great. But somehow I doubt that.
Read the presentation linked to in TFS. He specifically talks about using Google appliances for internal stuff — meaning it's nicely hidden away from the public and from Google — and using Google-hosted applications for documents that are supposed to be publicly accessible — meaning the public has greater access to information.
Note that the preview functionality in OS X is provided by the system (which has an internal PDF implementation... try opening the PDF in Preview), and the preview functionality in Linux is provided by a library.
Yes, it is the fault of bad Windows design, as well as bad application design. In OS X and Linux, the code that does PDF preview is extremely bare-bones without support for such 'features' as executable code. But it does the job.
The vulnerability is the result of a buffer overflow. You don't need executable code in the document to fall prey to it. In this particular case, it is easier to exploit the vulnerability if you use scripting in the PDF, but not necessary. Nevertheless, if this particular shell extension does happen to also execute scripts in the PDF, that's still not Microsoft's fault, since they didn't write the shell extension.
The libraries used by Linux and OSX are not immune to buffer overflows. If the libraries they use don't have this flaw, they still could, and it would be the fault of the library developers, not the developers of OSX and Linux.
The Adobe advisory indicates that it affects all platforms, and others in this thread have also pointed it out (some with links).
The second link in the summary also explains that the preview functionality is added through a shell extension installed by Adobe, as opposed to default Windows functionality, although obviously Windows provides the API to make it possible. Similar functionality exists in the Linux and OSX worlds.
This is not the fault of bad Windows design. This is the fault of unnecessary preview functionality available on all systems (and not written by Microsoft), combined with yet another bloody buffer overflow (also not written by Microsoft).
Your +4 Interesting (at the time I'm writing this) rant against Microsoft completely fails to take into account the fact that this vulnerability is not limited to Windows, but in fact affects all platforms.
Now, please write your rant 100 times on the blackboard, substituting "Linux" for "Windows", then write it 100 times more substituting "OSX" for "Windows".
I would think some good signal processing algorithms should be able to sync up a new drum track to some pre-recorded guitar/vocals/whatever without a click-track and without leaving any noticeable audio artifacts.
And how would that be a better option than just using the click track? A click track is easy to use with no extra processing required.
Consider the situation of apples. If you have an apple, then something is in your possession. If you don't have an apple, what do you have? Do you have some sort of object that depicts your lack of an apple? Obviously not.
The only reason most bands use a click track is if your drummer can't hold a tempo.
I can't speak for "most bands", but I can speak for the ones I've been in. I agree that there's no "requirement" for a click track, but it is a good tool to help achieve the best possible recording.
On the last recording project I was involved in, one of the things we did to prepare for the studio was record multiple versions of each song at various different tempos using a metronome, then listened to each version to decide which one we considered to be the "best possible" tempo for that song — at least, in a recorded format. That's the tempo we used for the click track when we went into the studio.
You'd be surprised what a difference a tempo change of as little as 2 BPM can have on some songs. When playing live, we would play the songs at the tempo that felt right in that moment, but on record it's a different story.
Of course, music is subjective. TFA suggests that something is lost when a recording is too mechanical, while some of us get driven insane by songs whose tempos keep fluctuating randomly.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, you do not understand. In the "real world" of today, governments give corporations the green light to do whatever they want with no accountability to the citizen. So they pollute and wreck the environment until citizens start screaming LOUDLY to the GOVERNMENT, and then the government may or may not do something. It's all backwards. And even if the government does something, the individuals responsible are never held directly responsible. Has anyone at Phillip Morris ever gone to jail for producing a product that has killed countless? Government spends all its time going after the small-fry drug pushers on the street and slams them hard for selling product that may kill a few people, but big corporations like Philip Morris still sells their killer product to many the world over and that's perfectly OK.
So your answer is to take away the government's ability to do anything about this, aside from prosecuting individuals for individual crimes (note: no one at Philip Morris has committed a crime in selling their product), and simply rely on the magical free market to grant people the ability to fix this problem by voting with their wallets (something that we're perfectly capable of doing right now, and yet still people the world over are buying cigarettes, smoking, getting cancer, and dying)? Do you not see how ridiculous that is?
Of course modern democracy is flawed. Of course voting seems to accomplish little. Of course corporations have too much power. Of course individuals, particularly in corporations, are not held accountable for their actions enough. And of course ridiculous things like the "War On Drugs" are causing more problems than they solve, and completely missing the real problems. We're in agreement on that.
I just don't buy the ridiculous libertarian notion that if we just leave it all alone and let the market rule, with people "voting with their wallets" — something that far too few can be bothered to do in this day and age — that everything will be just perfect.
I used to think that Correlation implied causation; then I took a statistics class. Now I don't.
Sounds like the class helped.
So corporations are also free as long as they do no harm to individuals.
So if, for example, a corporation is harming individuals by, say, polluting the environment those individuals live in, what exactly is supposed to prevent this? Consumers "voting" with their wallets? You do realize that, unlike voting with ballots, voting with wallets is a form of "democracy" that not everyone can afford, right? Therefore what you're talking about, from the consumer perspective, is really freedom for those who can afford it. As for those who can't afford to vote with their wallets, you want to diminish the effect of voting with their ballots.
So corporations who violate these principles will find themselves out of business before long.
Right. That works really well. That's why we have nothing but entirely ethical corporations in the world. After all, any corporation who does anything unethical (ie. harming the environment, harming workers, etc) will be "voted" into nonexistence by all the ethical consumers.
Modern libertarianism is mostly a wonderful idea combined with utopian ideology that fails the "Real World Test", spurred on by the false dichotomy of minimalist, impotent, barely-recognizable government vs. enormous, bloated, control-everything-you-ever-do government.
But it is true that the Party of a Republican in the news tends to be mentioned in the summary, while the Party of a Democrat in the news tends to be quietly ignored in the summary.
Someone (maybe it was you, I dunno) made a similar comment in an article a while back. Someone else came along and posted many links to Slashdot summaries which explicitly mentioned the offending individuals as Democrats, and even posted links to a few summaries that failed to mention that the offending individuals were Republicans.
I'm not going to do the same research that person did — if you don't want to believe me, that's fine. Nevertheless, it happens both ways. Sometimes it may be because the submitter has an agenda, other times it may just be that the submitter didn't really care what party was involved and simply neglected to mention it. Either way, it's no conspiracy.
In this case, I don't think the party is relevant, so I would have written the summary the same way. What matters here is that the use of voting machines is just begging for abuse, and now we have an example of it actually happening. Democracy is being destroyed by these machines. That's the real story.
Actually, I just had a thought. Since people always want to know which party is the "bad guy" in the story, maybe leaving the party affiliations out of the summary is a sneaky way for Slashdot contributors and editors to get the rest of us to actually RTFA.
FYI, it didn't work on me. :)
Because the first is going to (whether your think it or not, it's coming) mandate that the third operate 100% contrary to its beliefs and perform marriages to homosexuals.
That's complete and utter horseshit. The state has never, ever mandated that churches perform marriage according to its definition of marriage. The state has always stayed out of church sacraments. Separation of church and state works both ways.
The example I gave in another post is relevant here. I quote myself: "Currently, the legal definition of marriage allows a Jew to marry a non-Jew. It also allows divorced people to re-marry. However, Jewish synagogues will typically not perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Similarly, Catholic churches do not perform marriages for people who have been divorced. The government has never, ever stepped in and tried to force this issue on either institution. It is not going to start forcing churches to marry homosexuals simply because the legal definition allows it."
You want a world where 1/3 of the parties are shafted. I want a world where 3/3 win.
Wrong. What you've described is a world where 2/3 win. What I described is a world where 3/3 win.
You see, I want the legal benefits of a civil marriage. You want to take that away from me (and everyone else) and allow only the personal and religious aspects to prevail.
What I want is for all three aspects to exist for everyone who chooses any one, two, or three of them. I want a civil contract available to those who want the benefits of a legal marriage. I want a personal commitment available to those who want one. And I want a religious sacrament available to those who want that.
The only question that remains is over the use of the word "marriage", as opposed to terms like "civil union". The discussion frequently focuses on the incorrect belief that marriage started in the church, so the word should stay there. My point was that marriage actually started as a civil contract, so if anyone gets to "keep" the word, it should be the state. Of course, I was mostly trying to make a point by turning the original poster's argument against them.
If marriage is REMOVED from government it is by default in the hands of INDIVIDUALS.
Pay attention to the question that you were responding to. You even quoted it. The question was why marriage should "belong" to the church. You responded by saying that it should be taken away from the government so that it belongs to everybody. You answered a different question. I agree that it should belong to everybody. That's my point. It should not belong to the church. However, the state must still be involved for those who want the legal benefits of marriage.
Whether the state has any involvement in marriage or not, the personal aspect of it that you and I both want still remains. Anyone can, at any time, have a personal ceremony and pledge their commitment to each other. They can then call themselves married if they want. Neither the church nor the state will recognize that marriage, but so what? If you want either to recognize it, you have to go to that institution and go through their process to get it recognized. Each institution has its own requirements for that to occur. The state's requirements should not be influenced by church teachings, and the church's requirements should not be influenced by the state's definition. So far, in reality, the state does stay out of the church's requirements, but the church does not stay out of the state's requirements. That needs to stop. Now.
And we, of course, know everything about biochemistry...
No, but we do know quite a bit.
...and can prove that the chemical pathways involved in his cure are in no way related to the brown recluse spider toxin.
No, but we can apply a little logic and a liberal dose of Occam's Razor and come to a reasonable conclusion. "Magical spider bite cures paralysis" is not that reasonable conclusion.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
You need a piece of paper from the government to endorse a mutual personal commitment?
If I want the state to recognize it and to confer all of the associated rights, yes.
I wasn't stating that marriage is only a personal commitment. I was merely countering the previous poster's claim that "everyone else on the planet" views marriage as a religious matter. I see it as having three elements: personal commitment, legal status, and religious significance. The first element always applies, while the second and third are optional.
However, it may be expedient to let them pretend they do and change the legal definition to "civil union" or some such phrase.
This is the one area where I find myself disagreeing with many people who otherwise agree with me on the general principle. You see, the word "marriage" is a powerful word. It has enormous meaning to a lot of people. Therefore, I believe it should be available to the most people. This is accomplished by keeping the word within the civil realm, where it applies to everyone, rather than within the religious realm, where it only applies to the religious. If the religious want a limited variation on the idea, let them come up with a separate term for it.
No, what he is saying is that the government cannot force a church to perform religious rites on someone they do not want to. Separation of Church and State was one of the founding principles of the United States. Unfortunately, this principle was violated when they allowed the legal and religious definitions of "marriage" to co-mingle.
Let's be absolutely clear here. Legal definitions of marriage have absolutely nothing to do with a church's definition of marriage, and in no way forces the churches to do anything they don't want to do. If the legal definition of marriage allows gay couples to marry, no church will be forced to perform a gay marriage, ever.
Currently, the legal definition of marriage allows a Jew to marry a non-Jew. It also allows divorced people to re-marry. However, Jewish synagogues will typically not perform a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew. Similarly, Catholic churches do not perform marriages for people who have been divorced.
The government has never, ever stepped in and tried to force this issue on either institution. It is not going to start forcing churches to marry homosexuals simply because the legal definition allows it.
The churches retain the right to decide which people they want to perform religious ceremonies on, and can refuse to perform them on anyone they see fit.
Absolutely. And, if we kept "marriage" in its original place as a civil institution, and let churches have their own variation on the theme ("spiritual unions"), then this would further ensure that right.
Excuse me, but who said it had to be between individuals or only two entities.
If someone wants to 'marry' their cat, that's their own damned business and none of my own.
First, as I pointed out to another poster, the number "two" in my comment was more a matter of habit. I'm not saying it's necessary to restrict it to two. I do think the idea of marrying your cat is a bit ridiculous, since we can't actually be sure that your cat wants to marry you. I do think informed consent is necessary for a marriage to be worth anything.
I tend to agree that marriage should really be more of a personal thing than anything else. But, as long as there are legal implications to marriage (tax issues, property rights, etc), I do think there needs to be government involvement.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
Why two, rather than N?
Why indeed. It's a valid point. I suppose I really only typed "two" out of habit. Logically, I don't know if there's a reason to limit it to two.
I'm sorry, this whole "marriage belongs to the church and the rest of you can fuck off" idea is just complete bullshit. I say keep marriage as a civil institution, open to all -- gay, straight, theist, atheist, black, white, whatever -- and let churches perform their own "spiritual unions" instead.
Do you realize that you and the parent post actually want the exact same thing, but choose to use opposite terminology?
Yup. That was partially my point. I was trying to turn the previous poster's argument against him by simply swapping his revisionist view of history for a real view of history.
Personally, I think that for exactly the reason you described -- that "marriage" is an emotionally-charged word with lots of religious and historical connotations (whether you like it or not) -- the civil institution should be called a "civil union," specifically to avoid those controversial connotations. Anyone who's Hell-bent on getting something called a "marriage" is still free to take their "civil union license" to a priest instead of a judge.
Except that you're basically defaulting to having the word "marriage" belong to the churches. The word is extremely meaningful to many people — not just religious people — and therefore it should default to the institution that is relevant to everyone, including those who don't associate with a church.
What it really comes down to is this: marriage has three elements: legal (ie. marriage certificate and associate rights), personal (ie. romantic love), and spiritual (ie. religious sacrament). The first two (theoretically, at least) apply to all marriages. The third does not. So why should the arbiter of the third be the "owner" of the institution?
I think both of you are aiming for the same result, which is to remove the government's ability to restrict marriage, you're just disagreeing on which side (religion or government) gets to keep the term "marriage".
You're exactly right. My point is more that the people who insist on demanding that the church get to "keep" the word "marriage" (and I've encountered many of them) are arguing based on a revisionist view of history, and if real history is used instead, their argument actually works against them.
This whole "gay marriage mess" is a side effect of the fact that the US Government has decided to meddle in something that EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET views as a primarily religious matter.
Well, except for all of us who consider it to be, first and foremost, a personal commitment between two individuals.
Of course, neither that, nor your religious idea, have anything to do with the origins of marriage. It was a civil institution first. Basically, it existed to secure property rights and guarantee bloodlines. Then, somewhere along the way, people got it into their heads that if they're going to marry, they should marry someone they actually, you know, kind of like. So the idea of romantic love got injected into the mix. Then, further on down the road, the churches decided that they should have a role in all of this, so they injected a religious element to it. Then, much later on, people like you started thinking that marriage is entirely a religious institution, and that the rest of us (gays, atheists, etc) should just stay away from "your" sacrament.
Let the Pope decide what a sacrament should be and keep any hint of sacrament out of what the government does.
Oh, so now you want to prevent non-Catholics from getting married, too?
I'm sorry, this whole "marriage belongs to the church and the rest of you can fuck off" idea is just complete bullshit. I say keep marriage as a civil institution, open to all — gay, straight, theist, atheist, black, white, whatever — and let churches perform their own "spiritual unions" instead.
Government really should not be involved with religious sacraments and marriage is a religious sacrament.
Actually, marriage existed as a civil institution long before religion stuck its nose into it.
Perhaps what would be better would be for marriage to remain in the civil realm, thus avoiding any religious influence on who can marry whom, and instead allow religious institutes to perform "spiritual unions".
While free games are certainly an option, I find it very difficult to believe that you are going to have a team of 10 developers working 5 days a week, for nothing to develop a game.
Who said anything about not paying developers? The article is about companies finding a different way to make money besides selling the game. They're still game companies, and they still pay their employees.
Never before coming to Slashdot have I seen the two mixed up so frequently.
I've been seeing this mistake for years. In the 80's, on BBSes, people were constantly using that misspelling. This has continued through the 90's and the 00's on the intarweb. It's nothing new, and it's certainly not limited to Slashdot.
Loose and lose don't even sound the same.
The problem is that the word "lose" is spelled in a rather odd way. How often in the English language does the letter "o" followed by a consonant and then an "e" produce a long "u" sound? I mean, it's pronounced like "muse", but spelled like "dose". This confuses people, so they double up the "o" in order to give it a long "u" sound, similar to the sound in "choose".
It was vulnerable also, they got the patch out quicker.
Well, technically it was a different problem that just happened to be found in similar code. So, yes, it was also vulerable, just not vulnerable to the same problem.
"The Foxit and Adobe bugs are unrelated, however, except for the fact that they are both in the code that parses JBIG2 images, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer at Secunia AsP, the Danish company that reported the flaw to Foxit. "It is a completely different vulnerability related to JBIG2," Kristensen said in an e-mail Monday."
I use VB.NET for small modules myself when getting it done fast is more important than clean, compact code (one time use scripts, reports, etc)
...or making a GUI interface to track an IP address...
Reliability is not the problem. A private company handling documents is. ... If they decide to buy the apps from Google AND they are open source, great. But somehow I doubt that.
Read the presentation linked to in TFS. He specifically talks about using Google appliances for internal stuff — meaning it's nicely hidden away from the public and from Google — and using Google-hosted applications for documents that are supposed to be publicly accessible — meaning the public has greater access to information.
Note that the preview functionality in OS X is provided by the system (which has an internal PDF implementation ... try opening the PDF in Preview), and the preview functionality in Linux is provided by a library.
Yes, it is the fault of bad Windows design, as well as bad application design. In OS X and Linux, the code that does PDF preview is extremely bare-bones without support for such 'features' as executable code. But it does the job.
The vulnerability is the result of a buffer overflow. You don't need executable code in the document to fall prey to it. In this particular case, it is easier to exploit the vulnerability if you use scripting in the PDF, but not necessary. Nevertheless, if this particular shell extension does happen to also execute scripts in the PDF, that's still not Microsoft's fault, since they didn't write the shell extension.
The libraries used by Linux and OSX are not immune to buffer overflows. If the libraries they use don't have this flaw, they still could, and it would be the fault of the library developers, not the developers of OSX and Linux.
The Adobe advisory indicates that it affects all platforms, and others in this thread have also pointed it out (some with links).
The second link in the summary also explains that the preview functionality is added through a shell extension installed by Adobe, as opposed to default Windows functionality, although obviously Windows provides the API to make it possible. Similar functionality exists in the Linux and OSX worlds.
This is not the fault of bad Windows design. This is the fault of unnecessary preview functionality available on all systems (and not written by Microsoft), combined with yet another bloody buffer overflow (also not written by Microsoft).
Your +4 Interesting (at the time I'm writing this) rant against Microsoft completely fails to take into account the fact that this vulnerability is not limited to Windows, but in fact affects all platforms.
Now, please write your rant 100 times on the blackboard, substituting "Linux" for "Windows", then write it 100 times more substituting "OSX" for "Windows".
I would think some good signal processing algorithms should be able to sync up a new drum track to some pre-recorded guitar/vocals/whatever without a click-track and without leaving any noticeable audio artifacts.
And how would that be a better option than just using the click track? A click track is easy to use with no extra processing required.
Consider the situation of apples. If you have an apple, then something is in your possession. If you don't have an apple, what do you have? Do you have some sort of object that depicts your lack of an apple? Obviously not.
The above does not, of course, apply to tea.
The only reason most bands use a click track is if your drummer can't hold a tempo.
I can't speak for "most bands", but I can speak for the ones I've been in. I agree that there's no "requirement" for a click track, but it is a good tool to help achieve the best possible recording.
On the last recording project I was involved in, one of the things we did to prepare for the studio was record multiple versions of each song at various different tempos using a metronome, then listened to each version to decide which one we considered to be the "best possible" tempo for that song — at least, in a recorded format. That's the tempo we used for the click track when we went into the studio.
You'd be surprised what a difference a tempo change of as little as 2 BPM can have on some songs. When playing live, we would play the songs at the tempo that felt right in that moment, but on record it's a different story.
Of course, music is subjective. TFA suggests that something is lost when a recording is too mechanical, while some of us get driven insane by songs whose tempos keep fluctuating randomly.