Then clearly there's no reason to ever, ever, ever attempt to try again.
Was communism a successful economic model, at least in terms of it's implementation in the Soviet Union or China? Certainly not. Was it an attempt at addressing some very serious problems with economic disparity and problems in the previous economic systems? To some degree, yes. Do serious flaws exist in the way the world economy distributes wealth and resources around the world? Unless you're utterly blinded by doctrinaire views of capitalism, absolutely.
Excuse you, but both you and AC are wrong. The AC was merely being hasty and bullshitty. You, however, appear to have very poor reading comprehension. If you hadn't, you might have noticed two things.
First, when I said that the "m" following the dollar figure wasn't an SI unit, I wasn't saying that m isn't used to indicate thousandths in SI units. It is.
What I was saying is that dollars are not an SI unit. They are not. Indeed, if you were able to extract information from the things you'd read, you might have noticed the section in the article you cite titled "Non-SI units," where it states:
"They are also occasionally used with currency units (e.g., gigadollar), mainly by people who are familiar with the prefixes from scientific usage."
I point out both the title of the section, as well as the quote, wherein it indicates that the use of the SI prefixes is occasional and limited to scientific types, rather than common parlance.
More importantly, I'd like to point out that the SI prefixes are prefixes. If you look carefully at the string "$235m," you'll notice something about the placement of the "m." To wit, it's comes after - not just the unit (the $), but after the value itself. That's not a prefix, that's a suffix.
No, all is not too much. Corporations using the machinery of government and law to force universities into helping them punish people for intellectual property violations is already a bad idea. If it's permitted, the consequence of careless litigation by the recording industries should be fatal to the company. It's like the death penalty, but for imaginary people that get all the benefits of our government and its services, but without many of the responsibilities and risks.
That's odd, cause I use OSX every day at work, and typically keep several terminals open for hours at an end, doing a lot (most) of my work in them. And I've never seen the CPU usage jump for scrolling the terminal window.
Any company that sues a anyone for copyright infringement activity and doesn't actually have a good case should have all of their copyrights revoked, with all intellectual property reverting either to the original authors, or to the public domain if held for a period longer than 15 years.
It's amusing that you point out the problem of jumping to a conclusion, while jumping to an incorrect one yourself.
I didn't argue that there isn't a link between genetics and intelligence. I think there probably is. I said genetics and race, and you'll find that the mapping between race and genetics is significantly less exact and fixed than you'd imagine.
Ah, but you misunderstand. I never said that genetics didn't play a role in intelligence; likely genetics does play a role in intelligence. Genetics is not, however, race. Race is at best a very vague concept. And if you actually have a look at the studies regarding intelligence and race, you'll find that the situation is rather complicated, and is probably rather heavily if not exclusively societal in nature.
Leaving aside the complexity of the race/intelligence issue, you still don't make any headway against the point of my post - which is that being intelligent doesn't imply that the things one believes aren't stupid.
Let's pick a simpler example, say the belief held in pre-Newtonian physics that heavier objects fall faster than light ones. People who believed this weren't stupid - Aristotle, for example, can't fairly be called stupid. They are ignorant. Ignorantly believing something that's untrue is understandable. However, once a person has been shown evidence - that, all other factors being equal, bodies of differing masses fall at equal rates - and still clings to their previous belief, then they believe something stupid. They themselves might be quite intelligent, but for some reason, choose to cling to a particular belief, all evidence to the contrary.
Look, the willingness to believe a far fetched story that has no substantiation apart from a single book, the only provenance of which is questionable at best and the authority of which relies essentially on assertion by those who have the most to gain from it, is, to be kind, unbelievably stupid. Particularly when there's significant evidence that the account presented in the book is, at very least, deeply flawed, if not outright fictional.
There is absolutely no virtue to being willing to ignore rational arguments in favor of soothing traditional stories passed down from the ages. It's not bigotry, it's calling it what it is - a lot of stupidity.
Which is not to say that people who believe it are stupid, merely that they believe stupid things. And that's the central flaw in the argument that you present. Just because people who are smarter than I believe stupid things doesn't mean that those things aren't stupid. For example, James Watson (one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA) is clearly an intelligent man who's made significant contributions to science, and who still holds the idiotic belief that some races are naturally more intelligent than others owing purely to genetic reasons. The man? Smart. The belief? Stupid.
The only thing you're doing is according a specific bit of irrational stupidity a privileged place.
Also, not all religions depend on faith. Buddhism springs to mind.
...(which they no doubt wrote and pushed through themselves)...
And with your assistance in confirming it, my original assertion stands - you know absofuckingloutely nothing about the situation. You're making assumptions based on your personal prejudices.
I also don't know shit about the case, or the laws in France regarding this kind of thing. But if it's the French and it affects an American company negatively, then it must be bad!
It's insane because I, like you, know absofuckingloutely nothing about the situation!
I see you point, but allow me to make a counter point.
It's the copyright holder that receives an entitlement to earn money on his works that's arbitrarily mandated by law. Absent a government with copyright laws and enforcement, the creator of a work can either keep it to himself, or publish and let what happens happen. And it's the latter state of affairs that obtained through the majority of human history. The modern case, where a creator owns the intangible part of his work, is a fairly recent development. We still have Shakespeare, and he managed to support himself during his lifetime based on his works.
I'd also argue that releasing work into the public domain after a period of time helps foster new works based on the old ones. Whatever you think of sampling in music, for example, it's commonplace to make new works out of pieces of old ones (and it's not a new development - plenty of classical works are based on traditional melodies which must have been composed by someone at some time). Similarly for literary works - how many tellings of various Arthur legends are there through the literature of Europe? If someone had held the rights on the Homeric epics, would they have had the cultural influence they did in Ancient Greece?
You did strawman my argument, but probably not intentionally.
I don't think you should have to give away your book. But I also don't think that you (or your estate or whomever buys the rights from you) should have exclusive rights to it, or any "intellectual property" you produce for a period of 120 or 95 years. That's what I was calling insane.
Of course the creator of a specific work will tend to want to keep copyright for as long as possible to extract as much money as possible out of it. I wasn't thinking about the insanity from the creator of the individual work.
From the perspective of the consumer of works, i.e., everyone else, it's insane.
If you're trying to argue that cultural production will stop if copyright is somehow weakened, however, it's not a very strong point. By way of example, I point to the total of human cultural output before, say, the invention of the printing press.
A reasonable middle position does exist. People probably should be able to make some money off of their creative endeavors. On the other hand, the current duration of copyright in the US is silly - 120 years after creation or 95 years after first publication? That's insane.
The whitespace block delimiter thing is one of those things that lets you know if someone's opinions about python are pulled entirely out of their ass or not.
1) a great argument for national, single payer healthcare like in most of the rest of the non-3rd world.
2) What the fuck are you talking about? If I'm an alcoholic, my company doesn't have any responsibility to pay for my treatment, except as it regards medical costs (see point one).
As for the final toss of line, "Those of us who have nothing to hide, have nothing to worry about", fuck you.
I've also got nothing to hide, and I still don't want my boss poking around in my private life. If you're ok with it, fine; don't foist your willingness to drop your pants for your boss on the rest of us. It's assholes like you that enable totalitarian governments.
It seems like making people paranoid about protecting their personal data is the wrong way to attack the problem, especially given the significant chance that whatever they do, some 3rd party will release that data and put them at risk.
Instead, we should remove the incentive for identity theft and make it MUCH more onerous and difficult to get anything worthwhile out of stolen financial data.
Plus, it'd be nice to not get those 10-15 credit card offers a week in the mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Then clearly there's no reason to ever, ever, ever attempt to try again.
Was communism a successful economic model, at least in terms of it's implementation in the Soviet Union or China? Certainly not. Was it an attempt at addressing some very serious problems with economic disparity and problems in the previous economic systems? To some degree, yes. Do serious flaws exist in the way the world economy distributes wealth and resources around the world? Unless you're utterly blinded by doctrinaire views of capitalism, absolutely.
Cause some people still like using their own funny looking character sets.
All of this trouble, just so the hundreds of crappy IE only intranet apps all across the US will continue to work without any changes.
Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and just make people upgrade their apps to support a non-brain dead, IE specific version of HTML (+ random crap).
Excuse you, but both you and AC are wrong. The AC was merely being hasty and bullshitty. You, however, appear to have very poor reading comprehension. If you hadn't, you might have noticed two things.
First, when I said that the "m" following the dollar figure wasn't an SI unit, I wasn't saying that m isn't used to indicate thousandths in SI units. It is.
What I was saying is that dollars are not an SI unit. They are not. Indeed, if you were able to extract information from the things you'd read, you might have noticed the section in the article you cite titled "Non-SI units," where it states:
"They are also occasionally used with currency units (e.g., gigadollar), mainly by people who are familiar with the prefixes from scientific usage."
I point out both the title of the section, as well as the quote, wherein it indicates that the use of the SI prefixes is occasional and limited to scientific types, rather than common parlance.
More importantly, I'd like to point out that the SI prefixes are prefixes. If you look carefully at the string "$235m," you'll notice something about the placement of the "m." To wit, it's comes after - not just the unit (the $), but after the value itself. That's not a prefix, that's a suffix.
Summarily:
You're a jackass.
Yes, however, the "m" after the dollar figure isn't an SI measurement.
You're being pedantic, but you also don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Which is nothing new for this website.
No, all is not too much. Corporations using the machinery of government and law to force universities into helping them punish people for intellectual property violations is already a bad idea. If it's permitted, the consequence of careless litigation by the recording industries should be fatal to the company. It's like the death penalty, but for imaginary people that get all the benefits of our government and its services, but without many of the responsibilities and risks.
That's odd, cause I use OSX every day at work, and typically keep several terminals open for hours at an end, doing a lot (most) of my work in them. And I've never seen the CPU usage jump for scrolling the terminal window.
But maybe you're just an asshole.
Any company that sues a anyone for copyright infringement activity and doesn't actually have a good case should have all of their copyrights revoked, with all intellectual property reverting either to the original authors, or to the public domain if held for a period longer than 15 years.
They wrote QT, they want to distribute QT, and they chose terms to do it.
Obey their terms if you want to use their product. If not, find something else or write your own.
It's amusing that you point out the problem of jumping to a conclusion, while jumping to an incorrect one yourself.
I didn't argue that there isn't a link between genetics and intelligence. I think there probably is. I said genetics and race, and you'll find that the mapping between race and genetics is significantly less exact and fixed than you'd imagine.
Ah, but you misunderstand. I never said that genetics didn't play a role in intelligence; likely genetics does play a role in intelligence. Genetics is not, however, race. Race is at best a very vague concept. And if you actually have a look at the studies regarding intelligence and race, you'll find that the situation is rather complicated, and is probably rather heavily if not exclusively societal in nature.
Leaving aside the complexity of the race/intelligence issue, you still don't make any headway against the point of my post - which is that being intelligent doesn't imply that the things one believes aren't stupid.
Let's pick a simpler example, say the belief held in pre-Newtonian physics that heavier objects fall faster than light ones. People who believed this weren't stupid - Aristotle, for example, can't fairly be called stupid. They are ignorant. Ignorantly believing something that's untrue is understandable. However, once a person has been shown evidence - that, all other factors being equal, bodies of differing masses fall at equal rates - and still clings to their previous belief, then they believe something stupid. They themselves might be quite intelligent, but for some reason, choose to cling to a particular belief, all evidence to the contrary.
Look, the willingness to believe a far fetched story that has no substantiation apart from a single book, the only provenance of which is questionable at best and the authority of which relies essentially on assertion by those who have the most to gain from it, is, to be kind, unbelievably stupid. Particularly when there's significant evidence that the account presented in the book is, at very least, deeply flawed, if not outright fictional.
There is absolutely no virtue to being willing to ignore rational arguments in favor of soothing traditional stories passed down from the ages. It's not bigotry, it's calling it what it is - a lot of stupidity.
Which is not to say that people who believe it are stupid, merely that they believe stupid things. And that's the central flaw in the argument that you present. Just because people who are smarter than I believe stupid things doesn't mean that those things aren't stupid. For example, James Watson (one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA) is clearly an intelligent man who's made significant contributions to science, and who still holds the idiotic belief that some races are naturally more intelligent than others owing purely to genetic reasons. The man? Smart. The belief? Stupid.
The only thing you're doing is according a specific bit of irrational stupidity a privileged place.
Also, not all religions depend on faith. Buddhism springs to mind.
You're not so fond of fessing up when you get caught talking out of your ass, are you?
I also don't know shit about the case, or the laws in France regarding this kind of thing. But if it's the French and it affects an American company negatively, then it must be bad!
It's insane because I, like you, know absofuckingloutely nothing about the situation!
I see you point, but allow me to make a counter point.
It's the copyright holder that receives an entitlement to earn money on his works that's arbitrarily mandated by law. Absent a government with copyright laws and enforcement, the creator of a work can either keep it to himself, or publish and let what happens happen. And it's the latter state of affairs that obtained through the majority of human history. The modern case, where a creator owns the intangible part of his work, is a fairly recent development. We still have Shakespeare, and he managed to support himself during his lifetime based on his works.
I'd also argue that releasing work into the public domain after a period of time helps foster new works based on the old ones. Whatever you think of sampling in music, for example, it's commonplace to make new works out of pieces of old ones (and it's not a new development - plenty of classical works are based on traditional melodies which must have been composed by someone at some time). Similarly for literary works - how many tellings of various Arthur legends are there through the literature of Europe? If someone had held the rights on the Homeric epics, would they have had the cultural influence they did in Ancient Greece?
You did strawman my argument, but probably not intentionally.
I don't think you should have to give away your book. But I also don't think that you (or your estate or whomever buys the rights from you) should have exclusive rights to it, or any "intellectual property" you produce for a period of 120 or 95 years. That's what I was calling insane.
15, 20 years? Fine. A century? Not so good.
Of course the creator of a specific work will tend to want to keep copyright for as long as possible to extract as much money as possible out of it. I wasn't thinking about the insanity from the creator of the individual work.
From the perspective of the consumer of works, i.e., everyone else, it's insane.
You are 100% free to cease producing works.
If you're trying to argue that cultural production will stop if copyright is somehow weakened, however, it's not a very strong point. By way of example, I point to the total of human cultural output before, say, the invention of the printing press.
A reasonable middle position does exist. People probably should be able to make some money off of their creative endeavors. On the other hand, the current duration of copyright in the US is silly - 120 years after creation or 95 years after first publication? That's insane.
Python was written to be the scripting language for Amoeba (a research operating system developed in the Netherlands).
The whitespace block delimiter thing is one of those things that lets you know if someone's opinions about python are pulled entirely out of their ass or not.
Yours clearly are.
1) a great argument for national, single payer healthcare like in most of the rest of the non-3rd world.
2) What the fuck are you talking about? If I'm an alcoholic, my company doesn't have any responsibility to pay for my treatment, except as it regards medical costs (see point one).
As for the final toss of line, "Those of us who have nothing to hide, have nothing to worry about", fuck you.
I've also got nothing to hide, and I still don't want my boss poking around in my private life. If you're ok with it, fine; don't foist your willingness to drop your pants for your boss on the rest of us. It's assholes like you that enable totalitarian governments.
Genius.
It seems like making people paranoid about protecting their personal data is the wrong way to attack the problem, especially given the significant chance that whatever they do, some 3rd party will release that data and put them at risk.
Instead, we should remove the incentive for identity theft and make it MUCH more onerous and difficult to get anything worthwhile out of stolen financial data.
Plus, it'd be nice to not get those 10-15 credit card offers a week in the mail.
Are the same twits that really believe that "Clinton body count" email is true.
It's 8 years ago. Get over your Clinton Derangement Syndrome already.