the eastern half of Europe had to suffer half a century more under communist dictatorships, all as a result of the Nazi movement.
This is a very shaky conclusion. Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to divide the Europe before the later got greedy and attacked Russia. You should see videos of those two kissing and declaring brotherhood sometime. So Russia had plans regarding Europe irrespective of what Nazis did. Besides, poverty inflicted by extreme forms of capitalism was to large extent responsible for both German's support of Hitler and limited resistance to Russia imposing socialism on "liberated" countries. To this day, West European countries have high taxes and numerous government programs that make them very socialistic in nature. How can you blame that on either Nazis or Russians? Are you going to advocated banning Matrioshka dolls in France?
and I don't see that painting a swastika implicitly removes the rights of another person to the degree it needs to be banned
I don't think my wife will take kindly to anyone telling her to remove decorations symbolizing her Hindu traditions or that some European guy had any power to define the meaning of a 3000 year old symbol or even older Aryan (that is, Indian) race. A lot of our friends have swastikas on the doors of their houses to symbolize good luck. I guess it's a good thing we live in US rather than Europe, otherwise we would be as popular as people with star of David on their door were not too long ago.
Total freedom == anarchy and doesn't work with the high populations densities we have today.
I heard a lot of good things about Europe, but these sentence makes me glad I immigrated to US instead. I sampled your point of view while growing up in Soviet Union. Even though newspapers and TV made you think happy thoughts and didn't promote any racial divisiveness, your concept didn't work too good as a whole.
We don't want murder, and we don't want theft, although that affects the freedom of murderers and thieves.
So we outlaw detective novels and lock picking enthusiast clubs?
If you can't see that, then you agree we shouldn't hinder Virginia-Tech-like shooters at all and content ourselves with scraping the brains of our kids of the walls afterwards.
I am sure the shootings will go away if we suppress information about them from media and Internet.
Absolutely! What Europe really needs is to suppress any subcultures that promote supremacy of a particular race. One such culture goes so far as to publish a religious book that proclaims them as chosen people, something that even Hitler never aspired to. They frequently disallow their sons and daughters to marry outside their race. Their current homeland was created by displacing native population which until now is forced to live under horrid conditions in refugee camps. The divisiveness of their culture greatly contributed to interracial hatred that fueled WWII and most recently created instability in middle east that gave rise to 9/11 terrorists.
The suppresion of any materials is an attempt to supress this subculture, which is, in my opinion, in everybody's best interest. I propose immediate ban of Old Testament, Torah and other similar material from bookstores, e-bay auctions and web sites. Persons that persist in practicing this divisive culture are clearly dangerous and should be prevented from possessing firearms as well as register with the government. This way we can keep track of these individuals while we research a final solution to rid European Union of all interracial hatred and divisiveness.
How is censoring sale of historical artifacts protecting anyone? I have an interest in history of warfare and would buy a nazi artifact, along with those of allied forces, japan or US civil war to get a concrete fill for the history that I didn't personally experience. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it and I don't see how censorship is doing anything good for the future of peace in Europe.
Occam's razor is NOT a law of nature and most interesting discovering in science make us realize that things are NOT as simple as we imagined them. All materials are not made from Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Sun is not powered by compression of gas. Quantum physics and theory of relativity are highly non-intuitive and have given rise to extraneous, unobserved entities like dark matter and dark energy.
While evolution is well documented in certain cases, especially artificial selection of agricultural species, we just don't have enough fossil evidence to confirm how every currently or historically important plant and animal evolved. Scientists are inventing speculative "entities" based on a small fragment of a jaw bone.
One question not addressed by evolution as origin of man is why all humans alive appear to have descended from a single man and a single woman. We can certainly invent the circumstances that would make that happen or rely on various religious literature, but we don't really have any scientific evidence on how this transpired.
Where exactly did you pick number 18 from? Do you simply want to exercise your control as long as legally allowed? Do you believe government knows your child better than you and should be allowed to set the age of maturity that would be considered ridiculous for most of recorded human history?
A trustworthy website will remove malware after the first complaint and will give subsequent visitors a warning and a tool to remove the malware in question. There is still a risk, however the chance of encountering malware on a bank website is significantly less than 100% versus purposely malicious domains and the owner is spending effort to protect you rather than infect you.
Or you could just install all updates for your favorite OS or a 3rd party browser and virtually eliminate the chance of unintentionally installing a malware executable. Even IE7 is positively fascist when it comes to downloads and plugins these days.
Current species that inhibit the earth is a *FACT* Gravity is a *FACT* Genetic inheritance of traits and change observed in selectively bread domesticated species, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and environmentally stressed animals is *FACT*
Evolution as the sole origin of all species from inorganic matter is a *THEORY* Gravitons being closed-loop strings that can leave our 3D membrane into the bulk is a *THEORY*
One computer program writing something that a different computer program will read from a file system at a later date? Look at XML. If you save a non-trivial amount of processor or developer time, go with it.
And let's ignore the fact that AJAX really doesn't work without XML, will we? Because that kind of defeats the original whiney argument. What kind of alternative format were you thinking about that switching to XML actually saves processor time? As for the rest of the argument, you are mixing up cause and effect. It is only because other people chose to use XML that web browsers and many development tools include a parser. Otherwise, an efficient schema-driven binary format would work just as well in AJAX and Visual Studio. In fact, your example places undue restrictions on the program that will read the data at a later date. For example, you can not have a command line tool that finds and prints out one record out of a million because XML makes no provisions for indexing or even locating a record by number.
Here is another obvious rules: If a computer, at any time at all, has to parse or generate XML in large amounts, you are doing it wrong. There is really no need to resend the same string 100000 times, encode multi-megabyte binary data as BASE64 or lose floating point precision by encoding to or from strings. If need be, an efficient binary format can represent the data with an arbitrary schema. Communicating parties can exchange their schemas at runtime and avoid sending attributes that the other end is not going to use.
If this is so, when we create computers that can parse written information and communicate effectively, it won't really matter whether they are "conscious", and it won't matter what it would mean for such a machine to be conscious. Actually, it's THE most important question about such a computer. If it's not conscious, I should feel free to use this computer as a sex slave, arbitrarily examine or modify it's memory or intentionally expose it to damaging viruses. If it is in fact sentiment, even pulling out the power plug from a computer that doesn't boot but is making some intermittent beeps requires a debate on weather it is CPU-dead or in a minimally conscious state.
I happen to believe that consciousness MANIFESTS itself through quantum events and the brain somehow has unique ability to amplify such effects into macroscopic actions. In this case, simple pseudo-random number generators or even most physical sources of randomness would not suffice. But I wouldn't want to be proven wrong and create a paraplegic being destines to end up in a garbage dump in China within 3 years.
Human brain is non-deterministic and works very differently from computers. We experience self-awareness with it's numerous sensations which is certainly related to brain's electrical activity but is nevertheless not fundamentally explained by the same. Who is to say that this 2029 computer will actually have a consciousness, or that it will have a consciousness similar to ours. On the mechanical level, will it match human senses of touch and smell or is the "baby" computer supposed to develop by looking at world with a single webcam.
I say it's a baseless claim until these questions are addressed. It may be meaningful to say that a computer of a given era will be able to perform a complex but deterministic task which is currently the domain of humans, such as, say, driving a car.
In the context of a computer with classified information, P2P filesharing is a form of back door. Unlike Intranet server-based file sharing, the list of available files can not be centrally audited. Unlike FTP or SMB, programs like FireWire make extraordinary efforts to bypass firewalls, even potentially an HTTP-only proxy. Unlike a memory stick, computers can not be physically modified to prevent running P2P (unless you make federal employees use XBOX 360's with up-to-date firmware).
A federal agency blocking LimeWire and BitTorrent is a lot different from Comcast blocking LimeWire and BitTorrent and it's frustrating to see Bush administration going after the wrong thing. Let security-hardened versions of P2P be tried and tested in corporate world and then perhaps it will be ready for government use. I am thinking a version of BitTorrent where clients first share an encrypted file with each other and then get the decryption key and verify checksum from an Intranet server with a known public key.
I think I will just wait for my vendor to evaluate security of Silverlight and bundle it with an OS update. I have been enjoying the lack of spyware on my platform and I am not looking forward to making my browser be more like Internet Explorer. While the flash plugin is already bundled, I am avoiding Acrobat Reader because it's far slower and visually bulkier than the built in PDF viewer and hijacks the browser and file extensions.
Maybe Silverlight is the greatest thing on Earth, but I just have lost the trust in the vendor. I mean, would you really download any software from companies that made Gator, Comet cursor or New.net. Microsoft better ponder what happened to Real and come up with a strategy to regain the confidence that people had in their products in the days of early MS-DOS.
The only market segment decided so far are people who are willing and able to pay $600 for a high-def player or a game console. Apparently HD-DVD captured an even smaller mind share, but $150 players are only a recent phenomenon and it's effect on the market remains to be see. If and when Blu Ray players are available for under a hundred bucks and titles are around $25 we can talk about having a winner.
Nope, if the GP truly wanted sex, he would be able to get it with much less sacrifice than giving up TV for 6 months. Just come to a local bar with a dance floor and ask to dance with every women there in turn. Be liberal but not necessarily tasteless with your selection criteria - there are some decent looking 40 year olds that should be Ok for short term. Pick one that is moderately drunk and start taking slight and then slowly increasing liberties while dancing. If you can get to some good rubbing and petting without her backing off, offer to buy drinks until she is fairly high. Then ask to escort her home, to your place if it's nearby or book a mid-range hotel room. Make sure to carry some condoms and the rest is history. Drinks and hotel room for one night should cost considerably less than a 50" TV. You looks and conversation skills don't matter that much.
Oh, you mean you are looking for true love? Sorry, that's much tougher and likely to take longer than 6 months.
Maybe. But is that worse than forcing 100 million people to live under tyranny of the other 101 million? I just checked the Greyhound website and a ticket from Topika to Denver is $90 for a 10 hour trip. Given that healthcare, including abortions, is not free, I don't see this as a great additional burden.
Abortions where mother's life is endangered are likely covered by our right to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". But I would think that, once states are actually allowed to pass binding laws rather than just thumb their noses at the federal government, they will pass more balanced laws. For example, allow abortions in case of risk to mother's life and health, rape/incest, severe fetal defects OR a process where the mother sees ultrasounds, undergoes counseling, reviews offers of assistance and, meets prospective adoptive parents and then is certified by a mental health worker as distressed to a point of being likely to harm herself or the fetus during pregnancy.
The problem is that Republican candidates advocate a limited government, but only when it comes to wealth redistribution. They are perfectly happy to expand domestic surveillance programs, pass laws imposing their moral standards on everyone else (why should marriage definition be a federal issue?), subsiding big corporations of lobbyist buddies and so on. Basically, they want a government good for old, rich white men. I would vote for any Democratic, Republican or independent candidate who would vow to de-escalate federal power in an issue-neutral manner. For starters, apply the famed "strict constructionist" viewpoint to the rule that the feds will only be responsible for foreign policy, enforcement of constitutional rights of citizens and regulating interstate commerce in the most literal and narrow interpretation of settling trade disputes. Let the states define their own criminal codes and extradition agreements and prosecute crimes in jurisdiction(s) where they have occurred. Let some states decline to criminalize prostitution, internet gambling or smoking pot and learn from their own experience if they are willing to live with the consequences. Let liberal-leaning locales create their own universal health care and living wage programs as long as the residents are willing to pay the taxes. Let South Dakota outlaw abortion and teach biology from the Bible and deal with the consequences of most young women and college graduates leaving the state for California.
Until that happens, I would rather have some of the federal budget used on social programs and education than to have all of it be channeled into corporate welfare, unnecessary wars and enforcing personal viewpoints of the politicians.
Yeah, Preview is pretty good too. Unlike Acrobat, it starts instantly without the annoying logo popping up for half a minute in the middle of the screen and blocking all the other applications.
Slashdot Mirror
the eastern half of Europe had to suffer half a century more under communist dictatorships, all as a result of the Nazi movement.
This is a very shaky conclusion. Stalin signed a pact with Hitler to divide the Europe before the later got greedy and attacked Russia. You should see videos of those two kissing and declaring brotherhood sometime. So Russia had plans regarding Europe irrespective of what Nazis did. Besides, poverty inflicted by extreme forms of capitalism was to large extent responsible for both German's support of Hitler and limited resistance to Russia imposing socialism on "liberated" countries. To this day, West European countries have high taxes and numerous government programs that make them very socialistic in nature. How can you blame that on either Nazis or Russians? Are you going to advocated banning Matrioshka dolls in France?
and I don't see that painting a swastika implicitly removes the rights of another person to the degree it needs to be banned
I don't think my wife will take kindly to anyone telling her to remove decorations symbolizing her Hindu traditions or that some European guy had any power to define the meaning of a 3000 year old symbol or even older Aryan (that is, Indian) race. A lot of our friends have swastikas on the doors of their houses to symbolize good luck. I guess it's a good thing we live in US rather than Europe, otherwise we would be as popular as people with star of David on their door were not too long ago.
Total freedom == anarchy and doesn't work with the high populations densities we have today.
I heard a lot of good things about Europe, but these sentence makes me glad I immigrated to US instead. I sampled your point of view while growing up in Soviet Union. Even though newspapers and TV made you think happy thoughts and didn't promote any racial divisiveness, your concept didn't work too good as a whole.
We don't want murder, and we don't want theft, although that affects the freedom of murderers and thieves.
So we outlaw detective novels and lock picking enthusiast clubs?
If you can't see that, then you agree we shouldn't hinder Virginia-Tech-like shooters at all and content ourselves with scraping the brains of our kids of the walls afterwards.
I am sure the shootings will go away if we suppress information about them from media and Internet.
Absolutely! What Europe really needs is to suppress any subcultures that promote supremacy of a particular race. One such culture goes so far as to publish a religious book that proclaims them as chosen people, something that even Hitler never aspired to. They frequently disallow their sons and daughters to marry outside their race. Their current homeland was created by displacing native population which until now is forced to live under horrid conditions in refugee camps. The divisiveness of their culture greatly contributed to interracial hatred that fueled WWII and most recently created instability in middle east that gave rise to 9/11 terrorists.
The suppresion of any materials is an attempt to supress this subculture, which is, in my opinion, in everybody's best interest. I propose immediate ban of Old Testament, Torah and other similar material from bookstores, e-bay auctions and web sites. Persons that persist in practicing this divisive culture are clearly dangerous and should be prevented from possessing firearms as well as register with the government. This way we can keep track of these individuals while we research a final solution to rid European Union of all interracial hatred and divisiveness.
How is censoring sale of historical artifacts protecting anyone? I have an interest in history of warfare and would buy a nazi artifact, along with those of allied forces, japan or US civil war to get a concrete fill for the history that I didn't personally experience. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it and I don't see how censorship is doing anything good for the future of peace in Europe.
Occam's razor is NOT a law of nature and most interesting discovering in science make us realize that things are NOT as simple as we imagined them. All materials are not made from Fire, Water, Air and Earth. Sun is not powered by compression of gas. Quantum physics and theory of relativity are highly non-intuitive and have given rise to extraneous, unobserved entities like dark matter and dark energy.
While evolution is well documented in certain cases, especially artificial selection of agricultural species, we just don't have enough fossil evidence to confirm how every currently or historically important plant and animal evolved. Scientists are inventing speculative "entities" based on a small fragment of a jaw bone.
One question not addressed by evolution as origin of man is why all humans alive appear to have descended from a single man and a single woman. We can certainly invent the circumstances that would make that happen or rely on various religious literature, but we don't really have any scientific evidence on how this transpired.
Why did he need either level or a place to stand anyway? He could have just jumped and moved the Earth twice.
Judge granted a class action status to a lawsuit of customers against a company selling an "under a thousand dollars" TV for $999.95
Where exactly did you pick number 18 from? Do you simply want to exercise your control as long as legally allowed? Do you believe government knows your child better than you and should be allowed to set the age of maturity that would be considered ridiculous for most of recorded human history?
I used a site regularly until one day it tried to download some malware in an iframe and an flv file.
Well, did you report the problem and see if you are taken seriously?
For that fact alone I refuse to bank online, I just feel safer. Call me old fashioned....
I rather prefer online bank robberies to regular ones.
A trustworthy website will remove malware after the first complaint and will give subsequent visitors a warning and a tool to remove the malware in question. There is still a risk, however the chance of encountering malware on a bank website is significantly less than 100% versus purposely malicious domains and the owner is spending effort to protect you rather than infect you.
Or you could just install all updates for your favorite OS or a 3rd party browser and virtually eliminate the chance of unintentionally installing a malware executable. Even IE7 is positively fascist when it comes to downloads and plugins these days.
Current species that inhibit the earth is a *FACT*
Gravity is a *FACT*
Genetic inheritance of traits and change observed in selectively bread domesticated species, antibiotic-resistant bacteria and environmentally stressed animals is *FACT*
Evolution as the sole origin of all species from inorganic matter is a *THEORY*
Gravitons being closed-loop strings that can leave our 3D membrane into the bulk is a *THEORY*
I would say it places Opera users at unnecessary risk of becoming Firefox users :-)
Here is another obvious rules: If a computer, at any time at all, has to parse or generate XML in large amounts, you are doing it wrong. There is really no need to resend the same string 100000 times, encode multi-megabyte binary data as BASE64 or lose floating point precision by encoding to or from strings. If need be, an efficient binary format can represent the data with an arbitrary schema. Communicating parties can exchange their schemas at runtime and avoid sending attributes that the other end is not going to use.
I happen to believe that consciousness MANIFESTS itself through quantum events and the brain somehow has unique ability to amplify such effects into macroscopic actions. In this case, simple pseudo-random number generators or even most physical sources of randomness would not suffice. But I wouldn't want to be proven wrong and create a paraplegic being destines to end up in a garbage dump in China within 3 years.
Yes, and my refrigerator also runs on electricity. I should fill in a social security number application and claim it as a dependent on tax return.
Human brain is non-deterministic and works very differently from computers. We experience self-awareness with it's numerous sensations which is certainly related to brain's electrical activity but is nevertheless not fundamentally explained by the same. Who is to say that this 2029 computer will actually have a consciousness, or that it will have a consciousness similar to ours. On the mechanical level, will it match human senses of touch and smell or is the "baby" computer supposed to develop by looking at world with a single webcam.
I say it's a baseless claim until these questions are addressed. It may be meaningful to say that a computer of a given era will be able to perform a complex but deterministic task which is currently the domain of humans, such as, say, driving a car.
In the context of a computer with classified information, P2P filesharing is a form of back door. Unlike Intranet server-based file sharing, the list of available files can not be centrally audited. Unlike FTP or SMB, programs like FireWire make extraordinary efforts to bypass firewalls, even potentially an HTTP-only proxy. Unlike a memory stick, computers can not be physically modified to prevent running P2P (unless you make federal employees use XBOX 360's with up-to-date firmware).
A federal agency blocking LimeWire and BitTorrent is a lot different from Comcast blocking LimeWire and BitTorrent and it's frustrating to see Bush administration going after the wrong thing. Let security-hardened versions of P2P be tried and tested in corporate world and then perhaps it will be ready for government use. I am thinking a version of BitTorrent where clients first share an encrypted file with each other and then get the decryption key and verify checksum from an Intranet server with a known public key.
I think I will just wait for my vendor to evaluate security of Silverlight and bundle it with an OS update. I have been enjoying the lack of spyware on my platform and I am not looking forward to making my browser be more like Internet Explorer. While the flash plugin is already bundled, I am avoiding Acrobat Reader because it's far slower and visually bulkier than the built in PDF viewer and hijacks the browser and file extensions.
Maybe Silverlight is the greatest thing on Earth, but I just have lost the trust in the vendor. I mean, would you really download any software from companies that made Gator, Comet cursor or New.net. Microsoft better ponder what happened to Real and come up with a strategy to regain the confidence that people had in their products in the days of early MS-DOS.
The only market segment decided so far are people who are willing and able to pay $600 for a high-def player or a game console. Apparently HD-DVD captured an even smaller mind share, but $150 players are only a recent phenomenon and it's effect on the market remains to be see. If and when Blu Ray players are available for under a hundred bucks and titles are around $25 we can talk about having a winner.
Nope, if the GP truly wanted sex, he would be able to get it with much less sacrifice than giving up TV for 6 months. Just come to a local bar with a dance floor and ask to dance with every women there in turn. Be liberal but not necessarily tasteless with your selection criteria - there are some decent looking 40 year olds that should be Ok for short term. Pick one that is moderately drunk and start taking slight and then slowly increasing liberties while dancing. If you can get to some good rubbing and petting without her backing off, offer to buy drinks until she is fairly high. Then ask to escort her home, to your place if it's nearby or book a mid-range hotel room. Make sure to carry some condoms and the rest is history. Drinks and hotel room for one night should cost considerably less than a 50" TV. You looks and conversation skills don't matter that much.
Oh, you mean you are looking for true love? Sorry, that's much tougher and likely to take longer than 6 months.
Maybe. But is that worse than forcing 100 million people to live under tyranny of the other 101 million? I just checked the Greyhound website and a ticket from Topika to Denver is $90 for a 10 hour trip. Given that healthcare, including abortions, is not free, I don't see this as a great additional burden.
Abortions where mother's life is endangered are likely covered by our right to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness". But I would think that, once states are actually allowed to pass binding laws rather than just thumb their noses at the federal government, they will pass more balanced laws. For example, allow abortions in case of risk to mother's life and health, rape/incest, severe fetal defects OR a process where the mother sees ultrasounds, undergoes counseling, reviews offers of assistance and, meets prospective adoptive parents and then is certified by a mental health worker as distressed to a point of being likely to harm herself or the fetus during pregnancy.
The problem is that Republican candidates advocate a limited government, but only when it comes to wealth redistribution. They are perfectly happy to expand domestic surveillance programs, pass laws imposing their moral standards on everyone else (why should marriage definition be a federal issue?), subsiding big corporations of lobbyist buddies and so on. Basically, they want a government good for old, rich white men. I would vote for any Democratic, Republican or independent candidate who would vow to de-escalate federal power in an issue-neutral manner. For starters, apply the famed "strict constructionist" viewpoint to the rule that the feds will only be responsible for foreign policy, enforcement of constitutional rights of citizens and regulating interstate commerce in the most literal and narrow interpretation of settling trade disputes. Let the states define their own criminal codes and extradition agreements and prosecute crimes in jurisdiction(s) where they have occurred. Let some states decline to criminalize prostitution, internet gambling or smoking pot and learn from their own experience if they are willing to live with the consequences. Let liberal-leaning locales create their own universal health care and living wage programs as long as the residents are willing to pay the taxes. Let South Dakota outlaw abortion and teach biology from the Bible and deal with the consequences of most young women and college graduates leaving the state for California.
Until that happens, I would rather have some of the federal budget used on social programs and education than to have all of it be channeled into corporate welfare, unnecessary wars and enforcing personal viewpoints of the politicians.
Yeah, Preview is pretty good too. Unlike Acrobat, it starts instantly without the annoying logo popping up for half a minute in the middle of the screen and blocking all the other applications.