You know, it's not just the "Hitchiker's Guide". All kinds of books come up with tons of Christian references. "Guns Germs and Steel", I might see, but "Watership Down"?
There's probably something a little deeper here, that a social scientist could track down. Given what the list says, "Expected N, found M", it seems that they're taking the overall popularity of a certain book (N) and comparing it to the popularity of people who bought the book in question (M). Christianity may come up a lot because it is very on-or-off: either you're interested in reading about it, in which case you've bought a number of books on the subject, or you're not, in which case you haven't.
Either that, or the algorithm is secretly trying to push Christianity...:-)
The site has some example "opposites" on the front page. Some of the "opposites" made some sense -- like St. Augustine's "Confessions", and some romance novel called "Night Pleasures". But a book about Lisp and Wuthering Heights?
Although, to tell the truth, although I've programmed in many languages, and read Wuthering Heights, I've never actually programmed in Lisp... may be there's something to this...
To To some extent, part of Google's ability to foil bad website behavior relies on security through obscurity. If Google doesn't tell or hint to anyone how the cheat-detecting algorithms work... well, isn't that good for Google?
some extent, part of Google's ability to foil bad website behavior relies on security through obscurity. If Google doesn't tell or hint to anyone how the cheat-detecting algorithms work... well, isn't that good for Google?
One might argue that it's in Google's best interest to help out sites like this, that are clearly not just spammers trying to game the system. OTOH, preferential treatment might expose them to legal liability. Much better to treat everyone exactly the same, and keep mum on your actions as much as possible.
"Social engineering" has a specific, useful description of activity that may include lying. It's like saying, "For crying out loud, stop calling it 'grand theft auto' or 'petty larceny' or 'breaking and entering'. It's just stealing, that's all." Nobody is denying that the guy lied to people, or that what he did would have been wrong if he hadn't been paid to do it.
What slippery slope? We have a significant portion of the population that deliberately aborts unwanted pregnancies. If someday we benefit from the use of their medical waste to cure Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or even just slow down plain ol' ageing - Good for me, good for you, good for everyone!
I think the general sentiment is, "Stop the madness from getting worse."
Back in the day, children weren't considered human beings until they could speak. Have an unwanted child? Just leave it on the city walls to die of exposure. Or, dump it in the sewer. Or if you're really old-skool, go to the local temple and sacrifice it.
Now imagine that you're living in this society, but you happen to believe that killing a 1-year old child is murder. It's bad enough knowing that all the babies are dying and there's not a thing you can do about it. Now, the philosophers (scientists of that day) come up with a new use for all those dead babies: cure cancer! live longer! Instead of letting them die of exposure on the city walls or suffocation in the sewer, cut them open and take parts of their organs for other purposes. The babies are dying anyway, so at least we can get some good use out of them, right?
If you really were in this situation, wouldn't you be tempted to cry, "Stop! Wait! Slam on the brakes!"
I don't want to scream "WANKING!" but I find I can't help it. Pure pacifism pisses me off...It's like Veganism...Sounds good on paper, but is unworkable in reality.
What's worse is that the clause doesn't say, "No military use." It says, "The program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being, nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
The "...nor through inaction..." clause really is stupid, and unsatisfiable. People in Lebanon are being bombed right now -- what are you doing about it? Nothing? Well, sorry pal, you can't use this software! Besides which, both Hezbollah and Israel would claim to satisfy this clause:
Hezbollah:"We're not inactive! We're actively trying to stop Israel from acts of aggression, to save the Lebanese people!"
Israel:"We're not inactive! We're actively trying to stop terrorists from acts of aggression, to save the Israeli people!"
Maybe I should become a GPU developer, get some code accepted, and then sue the development team for breaking the license... after all, there are tons of people being harmed every day that they're not lifting a finger to help...
There seems to be a lot of unstated argument here. To begin with, technology advances by
understanding more about the laws of Nature, and
developing techniques to exploit those laws.
Secondly, when we observe an unusual phenomenon, that is not predicted by our current understanding of the laws of Nature, a fuller investigation will frequently lead to a more complete understanding of Nature's laws. Thirdly, if, when we saw something unusual, we were content to say, "Well, it must be a miracle," we would never investigate; thus, we would lose the opportunity to get a better understanding of the laws of nature, and thus also lose the opportunity, potentially, to develop techniques that exploit the better-understood laws ("technology").
I agree with you so far.:-)
As for "untestable" -- what does it mean for a hypothesis for a single event to be "testable"? Are the following statements "testable"?
O.J. Simpson killed Nicole
George (whose nick is martyros) posted to Slashdot August 6th
The meteor discussed in this article contained biological life from Mars
These questions aren't about scientific knowledge, but about individual events; and (as I understand the word), can't be tested in the rigorous, scientific sense. Scientific knowledge can be tested, and used as evidence, but the events themselves cannot. For instance, concerning the meteor, the original author had as evidence:
This meteor contains a certain type of crystal formation.
We have only seen this crystal formed by biological processes.
Therefore, this meteor probably contained life.
Not being able to test #3 directly, he tested #1 and referred to contemporary scientific knowledge for #2 in order to show that #3 was true. Subsequent authors, investigating #2, discovered that this crystal can be formed by non-biological processes as well. So, where does that leave us? "Well, maybe it had life, maybe not. We don't know." You can try to find more evidence, and use more clever arguments, but at some point, there may just not be enough there to know.
Even if #2 were true, it would not make the original hypothesis, "This meteor contained biological life" testable. The lack of testing doesn't mean that something can't be proven in the "court of law" sense -- either with the "preponderance of evidence" or the "beyond a reasonable doubt" measure, depending on how important the conclusion is. But it does mean that we may have to be satisfied with a "reasoned" answer rather than a "tested" answer.
Now, "God did it" is more useful as a philosophical answer. It can make you happy with your life, make you feel more secure and confident. It may not directly improve your lot in life, but greater confidence will likely help you make better decisions, leading you to help yourself (and maybe others), with or without help from Him.
Here you expose your unstated assumption: God did not do it. This paragraph essentially says, "God did not do it, but there's no harm in believing He did if it helps you psychologically."
Temporarily consider a hypothetical universe, in which God does interfere. Suppose God did do something by contravening the laws of nature. Then looking for a naturalistic explanation would be unfruitful and a waste of your time; and if the miracle was directed at you, it would probably be a waste of God's time. You'd learn nothing about the laws of Nature from studying one of its exceptions, and gain no spiritual benefit from it.
Let me emphasize, I think that we should look for a naturalistic explanation when confronted with some unusual phenomenon, unless there is good reason to do otherwise. But refusing to ever consider the possibility of divine interference in the course of Nature is based on belief in Naturalism, not an open-minded rational approach to the universe.
The problem is that many scientists insert an unspoken step 0:
0. Assume that everything that has ever happened in the universe is attributable exclusively to natural causes.
That may be a reasonable thing to assume for repeatable experiments that you are doing in your laboratory. And it's probably a good idea to generally look for and favor naturalistic solutions to events that happen in general. But to go from "Anything we don't understand msut have His hand directly involved" to "God's hand is absolutely never involved and never has been" is an unwarranted philosophical assumption.
Now, evolution may be the best explanation of the facts, even if you believe in the existence of a God who is not above meddling in the course of Nature once in awhile. But it is certainly true that many scientists begin from philosophical assumptions that would preclude them ever attributing anything to God, no matter how evident it were. And really, isn't "We refuse to consider any propisition that includes God" just as bad as "We refuse to consider any propisition that doesn't (explicitly) include God"?
It's not always about selling something. How many ads in traditional media do you follow up immediately? Ever go right to the store and buy something right after looking at a newspaper ad, or pull over at the next exit after you saw a sign for beer on the freeway? Not likely. It's as much about product recognition as anything else, and that happens whether you click through or not.
You only think that because you only know the "big bad" part of Microsoft. A pure research lab is a luxury generally only affordable by a monopoly, and Microsoft is one of the few ones of those around. They've been hiring academics for Microsoft Research for years now, and they have "lablets" near universities around the world.
As to why this research is done, there are two reasons. The "official" justification is that if it's possible, eventually somebody will do it, and it's a lot better if the "good guys" (yes, in this case that includes Microsoft) figures it out first and has a way to deal with it, than if some black hat figures it out and we discover 5 years down the road when everyone's computers are 0wn3d already and we're all caught with our pants down, so to speak.
The other reason was, it's just cool. I know the guy who did this work, and he's a brilliant "hack the system together and make it work" kind of guy. He had this crazy idea for an undetectable virus, and wanted to try it out just to see if it could be done. So he went to Microsoft for a summer internship, and got the prototype working with VirtualPC and a little internal help in 6 weeks or so, and spent the rest of the time analyzing defenses against it. Quite a productive summer for him.
It actually took some doing for this paper to see the light of day, as the higher-level managers had the same reactions you guys do. They could see the headlines: "Microsoft research inevents un-detectable virus", and thought, "Great, that's just what we need..."
Actually, the missing piece of information is the base-rate. What percentage of the time was the tone actually sarcastic -- 50%? Or 10%? Or 90%? And what chance did the readers/expect/ to find a sarcastic tone? If you expect half of the mail to be sarcastic, you're probably going to find sarcasm a lot more often than if you expect none or 10%.
That's another angle that the article doesn't cover: determining sarcasm or other flamewar-starting tones doesn't only depend on what you see, but what you expect to see.
All it has to do is log all non-deterministic external input during the initial run, and re-play the results from the log during the replay run.
So, if it does a virtual DMA to get the network packet the first time, copy the data from that DMA into a log. When you're re-executing, copy the DMA from the log instead of from the NIC.
It's similar ReVirt (my project), which was slashdotted here.
The downside, of course, is that you need to log *all* network data; so if you actually need that 1Gb ethernet, you're going to need some serious disk space to be able to used this feature.
Toeing the line and agreeing with the person who has power over you will get you a good grade, but will also destroy your chance to change his mistaken thought pattern, which would cause him to cease teaching his incorrect dogma to countless other impressionable students who deserve better.
How often do you think someone with such an incorrect dogma like that is going to listen to someone they're teaching? I might do it on principle (truth is truth, whether you get a A- instead of an A or not), but I'm not really hoping to change much.
True story: In a 400-level AI class at my university, the teacher was teaching us about first-order logic, and said "First-order logic is no good at expressing things to do with numbers." And, of course, it isn't very good. On an exam, there was an "extra credit" question, where they asked, "Is it possible to express the following relation in first-order logic? If so, give one; if not, explain why not." My memory is fading now, but it had something to do with "If X is older than Y but younger than Z".
Now, it is possible to express that in first-order logic, just in a rather convoluted and not very useful way. I came up with one clever way of doing it, and several other people in the class came up with equally creative solutions.
Well, you guessed it -- everyone who regurgitated what they'd said in lecture 2-3 times, "First-order logic isn't good with numbers", got 10 extra points; and everyone who sat down and actually tried to see what was possible got nothing.
I must've argued with the prof for a week, to no avail.
Well, if it's truly false, and the author has been told by several independent sources before the publication, and he still publishes it, how is that not libel?
That doesn't mean I shouldn't exercise and be as strong as I reasonably can
Yeah, I never at all meant to say anything like, "Well, if you can't get huge / be a genius, you might as well not ven try." I was just trying to balance the parent post: he was basically saying, "You're not stuck the way you are; you can exersize your body and your mind and change things." Which is true, but people need to realize that there are genetic dispositions here; you should definitely work to improve yourself, physically and mentally, but realize that some people will be more of a "natural" than you, and achieve without effort what took you years of work to do. Don't let that discourage you; also, don't listen to people who say, "It's easy! All you have to do is foo. It worked great for me! If it doesn't work for you, you must not be doing something right..."
Well, there's the obvious. Use it. A lot. The human machine is built around building up what gets "stressed."
While that's true, it should be pointed out that your body still has a genetic idea of it's "norm". Some guys have huge muscles, even though they don't do any weightlifting at all. ("It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest. I don't even exercise.") Some guys don't get big no matter how much they work out, unless they schedule their entire life around working out and eating massive amounts of protien. (I have a friend who did that for awhile and got a lot bigger, but he got sick of having his diet dictate his entire life. Within a few months of going off the diet regimen, he was back to his normal, lightweight size again.)
So yes, practicing, using it, studying, drills, all those things can improve your brain's preformance as well. But don't be surprised if you find someone who does none of those things and still thinks circles around you.
That's not really that hard... all the law needs to say is "It must be labelled 'SEXUALLY EXPLICIT'." If they label it '5EXUALLY EXPLICIT', well, they haven't complied with the law, now have they?
In the second year of his reign, Steve Ballmer had error messages; and his computer was troubled, and he could not reboot. So he summoned the contractors, code architects, designers, and marketers to tell him what his error messages were. When they came in and stood before the CEO, he said to them, "I have had an error message that troubles my computer, and I want to know what it means."
Then the contractors answered the CEO, "Oh CEO, may your empire expand forever! Tell your employees the error code, and we will interpret it."
The CEO replied to the contractors, "This is what I have firmly decided: If you do not tell me what my error code was and interpret it, I will have your hard drives cut into pieces and your offices turned into piles of rubble. But if you tell me the error code and explain it, you will receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. So tell me the error code, and interpret it for me."
Once more they replied, "Let the CEO tell his employees the error code, and we will interpret it."
Then the CEO answered, "I am certain that you are trying to gain time, because you realize that this is what I have firmly decided. If you do not tell me the error code, there is just one penalty for you. You have conspired to tell me misleading and wicked things, hoping the situation will change. So then, tell me the error code, and I will know that you can interpret it for me."
The contractors answered the CEO, "There is not a man on earth who can do what the CEO asks! No CEO, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any code architect or designer or marketer. What the CEO asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the CEO except the gods, and they does not live among men."
This made the CEO so angry and furious that he ordered the immediate termination of all the coders in Microsoft...
...The CEO asked Daniel, "Are you able to tell me what I saw in my error code, and interpret it?"
Daniel replied, "No computer guru, code architect, designer, or support staff can explain to the CEO the mystery he has asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. He has shown CEO Ballmer what will happen in days to come. Your error codes and BSODs that passed through your monitor as you sat at your desk are these..."
(Stolen from Chapter 2 of the book of Daniel.) BTB, notice that God wasn't asking for blind faith here; that's not the way the God of the Bible works.
Uum, I think he's probably talking about Nebuchadnazzer (sp?), who demanded that his advisors tell him not only what the dream meant, but what he had dreamed in the first place.
My guess is that he thought his "advisors" were full of bull, and were trying to manipulate him. So he said, "If you guys are so in tune with the supernatural, you should be able to tell me my dream." (Sort of like, "Why doesn't the Psychic Hotline lady call me?")
His advisors, understandably, said, "You're on crack -- no king in history has asked something like that", to which he replied, "I'll show you who's on crack..."
I understand there are still lots of people that do their coding in vim. And I understand why, finally.;) But I genuinely like GUIs, so vim isn't the right fit for me.
I'd have to disagree... "male" or "female" describes a biological fact; but "masculine" or "feminine" describes their attributes. You've never met a masculine woman? Or a feminine man? Or heard a man described as "masculine"? It means not only does he have a Y-chromosome and the appropriate plumbing, but that he has attributes which are typically associated with masculinity: strong, handsome, bold, a leader, etc.
AV software is not a necessary part of an Operating System. I've been using Linux for almost a decade without using any AV software...
How many viruses do you know that are written for Linux? Not many, huh? You probably should be using some kind of intrusion detection system, however, which serves pretty much the same function.
Now, I agree that an intrusion detection system shouldn't be part of the kernel -- but as RMS points out, a kernel is not an operating system: it's useless without all the supporting tools and functionality. I'd say that for a modern operating system, a gui system, a good desktop, a web browser, and a media player are all part of what's necessary for a desktop OS. So is a personal firewall. It's becoming arguable that AV software is a part of that -- basically everyone who owns a computer has it, or probably needs it.
A similar thing happened while I was in the military. At first, everyone was issued plain canteens. Then Camelback invented their hydration system that was extremely useful; indivual members bought Camelbacks because they were better in a lot of situations. Eventually, 75% of us had them. The next gear design included Camelbacks as standard issue. (Canteens will always be with us, of course.)
The same thing has happened with web browsers and media players -- every desktop OS includes one by default. Now it's happening with AV software.
I'm not pro-Microsoft in the slightest, and I certainly believe they abuse their monopoly power. But I think that for Microsoft boxen, good AV software really is a necessary part of the system, and it makes sense to include it.
It's not that it's a bad thing, but that it's news. AMD started out as a copycat, gradually introduced their own innovations, and now Intel is playing the copycat. It's embarassing for Intel, the "market leader", to be in a position of following someone else's lead -- especially AMD's.
What's bad, though understandable, is that they don't mention at all that this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
There's probably something a little deeper here, that a social scientist could track down. Given what the list says, "Expected N, found M", it seems that they're taking the overall popularity of a certain book (N) and comparing it to the popularity of people who bought the book in question (M). Christianity may come up a lot because it is very on-or-off: either you're interested in reading about it, in which case you've bought a number of books on the subject, or you're not, in which case you haven't.
Either that, or the algorithm is secretly trying to push Christianity... :-)
Although, to tell the truth, although I've programmed in many languages, and read Wuthering Heights, I've never actually programmed in Lisp... may be there's something to this...
One might argue that it's in Google's best interest to help out sites like this, that are clearly not just spammers trying to game the system. OTOH, preferential treatment might expose them to legal liability. Much better to treat everyone exactly the same, and keep mum on your actions as much as possible.
"Social engineering" has a specific, useful description of activity that may include lying. It's like saying, "For crying out loud, stop calling it 'grand theft auto' or 'petty larceny' or 'breaking and entering'. It's just stealing, that's all." Nobody is denying that the guy lied to people, or that what he did would have been wrong if he hadn't been paid to do it.
I think the general sentiment is, "Stop the madness from getting worse."
Back in the day, children weren't considered human beings until they could speak. Have an unwanted child? Just leave it on the city walls to die of exposure. Or, dump it in the sewer. Or if you're really old-skool, go to the local temple and sacrifice it.
Now imagine that you're living in this society, but you happen to believe that killing a 1-year old child is murder. It's bad enough knowing that all the babies are dying and there's not a thing you can do about it. Now, the philosophers (scientists of that day) come up with a new use for all those dead babies: cure cancer! live longer! Instead of letting them die of exposure on the city walls or suffocation in the sewer, cut them open and take parts of their organs for other purposes. The babies are dying anyway, so at least we can get some good use out of them, right?
If you really were in this situation, wouldn't you be tempted to cry, "Stop! Wait! Slam on the brakes!"
What's worse is that the clause doesn't say, "No military use." It says, "The program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being, nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
The "...nor through inaction..." clause really is stupid, and unsatisfiable. People in Lebanon are being bombed right now -- what are you doing about it? Nothing? Well, sorry pal, you can't use this software! Besides which, both Hezbollah and Israel would claim to satisfy this clause:
Maybe I should become a GPU developer, get some code accepted, and then sue the development team for breaking the license... after all, there are tons of people being harmed every day that they're not lifting a finger to help...
There seems to be a lot of unstated argument here. To begin with, technology advances by
Secondly, when we observe an unusual phenomenon, that is not predicted by our current understanding of the laws of Nature, a fuller investigation will frequently lead to a more complete understanding of Nature's laws. Thirdly, if, when we saw something unusual, we were content to say, "Well, it must be a miracle," we would never investigate; thus, we would lose the opportunity to get a better understanding of the laws of nature, and thus also lose the opportunity, potentially, to develop techniques that exploit the better-understood laws ("technology").
I agree with you so far. :-)
As for "untestable" -- what does it mean for a hypothesis for a single event to be "testable"? Are the following statements "testable"?
These questions aren't about scientific knowledge, but about individual events; and (as I understand the word), can't be tested in the rigorous, scientific sense. Scientific knowledge can be tested, and used as evidence, but the events themselves cannot. For instance, concerning the meteor, the original author had as evidence:
Not being able to test #3 directly, he tested #1 and referred to contemporary scientific knowledge for #2 in order to show that #3 was true. Subsequent authors, investigating #2, discovered that this crystal can be formed by non-biological processes as well. So, where does that leave us? "Well, maybe it had life, maybe not. We don't know." You can try to find more evidence, and use more clever arguments, but at some point, there may just not be enough there to know.
Even if #2 were true, it would not make the original hypothesis, "This meteor contained biological life" testable. The lack of testing doesn't mean that something can't be proven in the "court of law" sense -- either with the "preponderance of evidence" or the "beyond a reasonable doubt" measure, depending on how important the conclusion is. But it does mean that we may have to be satisfied with a "reasoned" answer rather than a "tested" answer.
Here you expose your unstated assumption: God did not do it. This paragraph essentially says, "God did not do it, but there's no harm in believing He did if it helps you psychologically."
Temporarily consider a hypothetical universe, in which God does interfere. Suppose God did do something by contravening the laws of nature. Then looking for a naturalistic explanation would be unfruitful and a waste of your time; and if the miracle was directed at you, it would probably be a waste of God's time. You'd learn nothing about the laws of Nature from studying one of its exceptions, and gain no spiritual benefit from it.
Let me emphasize, I think that we should look for a naturalistic explanation when confronted with some unusual phenomenon, unless there is good reason to do otherwise. But refusing to ever consider the possibility of divine interference in the course of Nature is based on belief in Naturalism, not an open-minded rational approach to the universe.
That may be a reasonable thing to assume for repeatable experiments that you are doing in your laboratory. And it's probably a good idea to generally look for and favor naturalistic solutions to events that happen in general. But to go from "Anything we don't understand msut have His hand directly involved" to "God's hand is absolutely never involved and never has been" is an unwarranted philosophical assumption.
Now, evolution may be the best explanation of the facts, even if you believe in the existence of a God who is not above meddling in the course of Nature once in awhile. But it is certainly true that many scientists begin from philosophical assumptions that would preclude them ever attributing anything to God, no matter how evident it were. And really, isn't "We refuse to consider any propisition that includes God" just as bad as "We refuse to consider any propisition that doesn't (explicitly) include God"?
It's not always about selling something. How many ads in traditional media do you follow up immediately? Ever go right to the store and buy something right after looking at a newspaper ad, or pull over at the next exit after you saw a sign for beer on the freeway? Not likely. It's as much about product recognition as anything else, and that happens whether you click through or not.
As to why this research is done, there are two reasons. The "official" justification is that if it's possible, eventually somebody will do it, and it's a lot better if the "good guys" (yes, in this case that includes Microsoft) figures it out first and has a way to deal with it, than if some black hat figures it out and we discover 5 years down the road when everyone's computers are 0wn3d already and we're all caught with our pants down, so to speak.
The other reason was, it's just cool. I know the guy who did this work, and he's a brilliant "hack the system together and make it work" kind of guy. He had this crazy idea for an undetectable virus, and wanted to try it out just to see if it could be done. So he went to Microsoft for a summer internship, and got the prototype working with VirtualPC and a little internal help in 6 weeks or so, and spent the rest of the time analyzing defenses against it. Quite a productive summer for him.
It actually took some doing for this paper to see the light of day, as the higher-level managers had the same reactions you guys do. They could see the headlines: "Microsoft research inevents un-detectable virus", and thought, "Great, that's just what we need..."
That's another angle that the article doesn't cover: determining sarcasm or other flamewar-starting tones doesn't only depend on what you see, but what you expect to see.
Too bad, according to himself, the guy who said this didn't know what he was talking about.
So, if it does a virtual DMA to get the network packet the first time, copy the data from that DMA into a log. When you're re-executing, copy the DMA from the log instead of from the NIC.
It's similar ReVirt (my project), which was slashdotted here.
The downside, of course, is that you need to log *all* network data; so if you actually need that 1Gb ethernet, you're going to need some serious disk space to be able to used this feature.
True story: In a 400-level AI class at my university, the teacher was teaching us about first-order logic, and said "First-order logic is no good at expressing things to do with numbers." And, of course, it isn't very good. On an exam, there was an "extra credit" question, where they asked, "Is it possible to express the following relation in first-order logic? If so, give one; if not, explain why not." My memory is fading now, but it had something to do with "If X is older than Y but younger than Z".
Now, it is possible to express that in first-order logic, just in a rather convoluted and not very useful way. I came up with one clever way of doing it, and several other people in the class came up with equally creative solutions.
Well, you guessed it -- everyone who regurgitated what they'd said in lecture 2-3 times, "First-order logic isn't good with numbers", got 10 extra points; and everyone who sat down and actually tried to see what was possible got nothing.
I must've argued with the prof for a week, to no avail.
Well, if it's truly false, and the author has been told by several independent sources before the publication, and he still publishes it, how is that not libel?
These two could be done on Windows as well -- not sure how easily, but it can be done.
Yeah, I never at all meant to say anything like, "Well, if you can't get huge / be a genius, you might as well not ven try." I was just trying to balance the parent post: he was basically saying, "You're not stuck the way you are; you can exersize your body and your mind and change things." Which is true, but people need to realize that there are genetic dispositions here; you should definitely work to improve yourself, physically and mentally, but realize that some people will be more of a "natural" than you, and achieve without effort what took you years of work to do. Don't let that discourage you; also, don't listen to people who say, "It's easy! All you have to do is foo. It worked great for me! If it doesn't work for you, you must not be doing something right..."
While that's true, it should be pointed out that your body still has a genetic idea of it's "norm". Some guys have huge muscles, even though they don't do any weightlifting at all. ("It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest. I don't even exercise.") Some guys don't get big no matter how much they work out, unless they schedule their entire life around working out and eating massive amounts of protien. (I have a friend who did that for awhile and got a lot bigger, but he got sick of having his diet dictate his entire life. Within a few months of going off the diet regimen, he was back to his normal, lightweight size again.)
So yes, practicing, using it, studying, drills, all those things can improve your brain's preformance as well. But don't be surprised if you find someone who does none of those things and still thinks circles around you.
That's not really that hard... all the law needs to say is "It must be labelled 'SEXUALLY EXPLICIT'." If they label it '5EXUALLY EXPLICIT', well, they haven't complied with the law, now have they?
My guess is that he thought his "advisors" were full of bull, and were trying to manipulate him. So he said, "If you guys are so in tune with the supernatural, you should be able to tell me my dream." (Sort of like, "Why doesn't the Psychic Hotline lady call me?")
His advisors, understandably, said, "You're on crack -- no king in history has asked something like that", to which he replied, "I'll show you who's on crack..."
I'd have to disagree... "male" or "female" describes a biological fact; but "masculine" or "feminine" describes their attributes. You've never met a masculine woman? Or a feminine man? Or heard a man described as "masculine"? It means not only does he have a Y-chromosome and the appropriate plumbing, but that he has attributes which are typically associated with masculinity: strong, handsome, bold, a leader, etc.
How many viruses do you know that are written for Linux? Not many, huh? You probably should be using some kind of intrusion detection system, however, which serves pretty much the same function.
Now, I agree that an intrusion detection system shouldn't be part of the kernel -- but as RMS points out, a kernel is not an operating system: it's useless without all the supporting tools and functionality. I'd say that for a modern operating system, a gui system, a good desktop, a web browser, and a media player are all part of what's necessary for a desktop OS. So is a personal firewall. It's becoming arguable that AV software is a part of that -- basically everyone who owns a computer has it, or probably needs it.
A similar thing happened while I was in the military. At first, everyone was issued plain canteens. Then Camelback invented their hydration system that was extremely useful; indivual members bought Camelbacks because they were better in a lot of situations. Eventually, 75% of us had them. The next gear design included Camelbacks as standard issue. (Canteens will always be with us, of course.)
The same thing has happened with web browsers and media players -- every desktop OS includes one by default. Now it's happening with AV software.
I'm not pro-Microsoft in the slightest, and I certainly believe they abuse their monopoly power. But I think that for Microsoft boxen, good AV software really is a necessary part of the system, and it makes sense to include it.
What's bad, though understandable, is that they don't mention at all that this is the case.