Actually, even having them sign it with your public key might not be so bad. Signing something with public/private key encryption is not a lightweight operation; it's a lot more CPU horsepower to sign 10,000 mail messages with 10,000 different public keys, than to just send them out cleartext. This puts more cost at the spammer's end, and would make it more worth their while to use more accurately targeted e-mail -- i.e., we can make e-mail actually analogous to postal junk mail.
Most people just don't send enough mail in a day to have it be a big problem, but listservs might require a different solution.
Even-tempered ~ equal tempered (?) ~ based on the twelfth root of 2
Yes, it would be incredibly stupid to try to make a chromatic scale all on the same interval using anything but even temperment; it just doesnt' add up.
But that doesn't mean you can't make a normal scale that sounds good (in fact, REALLY good, since you're used to even temperment being just a bit 'out of tune' [i.e., all the intervals have a little 'wolf' in them so that none have a lot]) in one key based on simple whole-number ratios. You just can't change key...
Sounds like an interesting book, I may have to check it out sometime.
The pythagorean scale does not have equally spaced notes. As I recall, the notes will be slightly sharp after you go up an octave. The farther you go, the sharper you get, making the scale play out of tune over large intervals.
A choir sings in tune because each singer adjusts their pitch slightly to make the current chord in tune.
Huh? I thought the Pythagorean scale was based on whole-number ratios: An octave is 2:1, a fifth is 3:2, a fourth is 4:3, etc. But if you do the math, 3/2 * 4/3 == 4/2 == 2/1, so the octaves are still in tune.
Actually, brass instruments naturally hit notes on the pythagorean scale (if that's what this is) becaues they actually do use harmonics; thus to play in tune with a piano (or with another instrument using another fundamental note) they have to adjust slightly based on what harmonic they're using. Thus I remember my HS band director telling the trumpets to 'lip up' their E's, because the instrument tended to make them flat; in other words, 'just temperment' 3rd ratio is smaller than the 'even-tempered' 3rd ratio. But all the open C's on a trumpet, no matter what octave, are always perfectly in tune with each other (as long as the musician's lips are in good shape).
I think what you may be talking about is when you tune a piano using only one interval -- i.e., tune the C; then tune the G to be a perfect 5th to the C, tune the D to be perfect to the G, tune the A to be perfect to the D, etc; in that case, when you finally get around to C again, you'll have an awful howling, because the just tempered 5th (i.e., 3:2) is a tad too large; even temper makes it a bit flatter, so that it all adds up.
It just seems strange to me, that things are this way... in order to be able to play in all keys, you have to make all keys sound slightly out of tune (or adjust on-the-fly, if you can). I'm sure there's a moral there somewhere...
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
Yes, that's exactly what it is; but the reason people are doing this is because there is no other recourse. If there were justice, there would be no need for SPEWS; so until we do get justice against spammers, we're going to have terrorism and vigilantism, with all the nastiness that goes along with it.
I'm sorry that your business was hurt by this spammer on your ISP; I'm also sorry that my mom got an e-mail with a wide array of penises on it. I'm also sorry that I don't dare put my e-mail address in public places for real people to contact me because of something they've seen on my website or something I've said (which I'd enjoy), for fear that I'll get on 100x as many spam lists as I am now. I'm sorry for all the time I waste tweaking spam filters and grepping through my 'reject bin' when I could be doing something useful, and I'm sorry for all the mail I never look at, because it didn't happen to be whitelisted and I lost it in all the junk.
I don't understand why people are all pissy about this.
Microsoft built a private system for communication, they allowed/tolerated anyone connecting to the network with any compatible client up to this point.
No, that's not the case, for one simple reason: MS is a monopoly. It's not a level playing field: as people have pointed out, they have the ability to automatically include Messenger in their operating system, which gives them a gigantic levarage over any other messenger service.
It's 100% clear that Microsoft wants to dominate every interesting aspect of computing; and they're doing that by illegally leveraging their power in one area to gain power in another area. If they simply put the Messenger client on some site and let people download it, then they'd be in the same boat as AIM or ICQ; it would grow or shrink based only on its merits / popularity.
Intel is in the same position, and treads a lot more carefully. There's a lot of things they don't do -- things that they could do if they were AMD or Transmeta -- simply to avoid raising anti-trust suspicions. If our government had any sense / balls, Microsoft would be dead by now for its violations.
You're right, it does cost money to maintain a service, and GAIM and other 3rd-party software doesn't make them any money; but AIM has opened its spec (to a degree, anyway) -- the only reason Microsoft can afford to do this is because it also controls the OS of 90% of desktop machines out there.
As for whether "terrorists" would target the power grid, I don't see it. Not much bang for the buck. How many died in this, the biggest outage in the US for decades? A half-dozen. It'll be forgotten in a few weeks.
Hmm, I'd have to disagree. For just the two days that we were out, it's not a big deal... it's actually kind of novel, an adventure. But it sounds like you weren't here:
You can't cook anything if you have an electric stove. Sure, you can live off peanut butter & jelly, and canned tuna for a few days; but that's going to get old really quick. Lunch meats & cheese spoil. Some people are lucky enough to have charcoal or gas grill, but you can't store it for more than a day or two, and neither can stores.
It's really tough to buy gasoline. There were only a handful of places with power to run the pumps or the credit card machines, and at some point everyone realized, "Hey, I have only about a 1/4 tank of gas, and this may last more than a day..." and rushed to the gas stations to wait in long lines.
You can't access your e-mail, the internet, watch TV, listen to the radio (unless you have battery-powered radio, or in your car; but remember, gas is hard to come by, and batteries only last so long). Even if you can listen to the radio, most of the radio stations are out; those that are on are talking about the power outage. Now, I don't really watch that much TV or play many games, so I have many ways of seeking entertainment that don't require electricity; but how many Americans are used to doing that?
There is no A/C, no fans, no ice, and after a day the water from the tap wasn't potable: it was pretty hot and humid, with no relief.
In the winter, because most heating systems have electronic switches, there would be no heat either (though that's easier to deal with: everybody has coats and blankets).
Think of all the economic havoc that's going to be wreaked. The entire production of the city of Detroit was shut down for at least a day! This is going to reverberate through the stock markets and financial things pretty soon.
Anyway, the point of terrorism isn't to kill people; the point of terrorism is to make large amounts of people live in fear of something, and through this to put pressure on the goverment. Imagine that Al Qaida managed to do this once a month without being caught, each time demanding, "Pull US troops out of the Holy Land of Mecca!" How many months do you think it would be before popular demand to remove troops from Mecca would be deafening?
"Contains 100% human DNA, and has grown into a fully-functional human being."
All ambiguity gone, and clumps of cells which can't exist outside of a host are not covered in the definition. Happy now?
[Sorry for the delay in response, I'm in the Detroit area, so I haven't had e-mail for a couple of days.]
Now I have a definition, but the ambiguity isn't gone yet. What exactly constitutes a 'fully functional human being'? Is a new-born baby 'fully functional'? What about 20 minutes before it's born? It certainly can't talk, walk, or do any of the other things which we attribute to full-grown humans. Is it OK to experiment on them? What about toddlers who can't talk, or pre-teens who haven't gone through puberty yet. They can talk and walk, but they can't reproduce yet.
And what if I become blind? What if I lose a leg? What if I don't have the mental capacity to read words bigger than 4 letters? Am I still 'fully functional', or can I be torn apart for someone else's benefit?
And turning it around, isn't an embryo fully functional? It's alive and growing, doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing at that stage of development. There's nothing broken about it at all. How is it not 'fully functional'? If the embryo "couldn't exist outside of a host", then the embryonic stem cells would be useless. If you mean, "Will die without some sort of external interference", a newborn baby is in the exact same boat.
So you see, you haven't done anything at all to bring clarity. Give me a consistent definition that gives all the right answers to the above questions.
Saying, "Human organisms inside someone else's body don't have rights" or "Human organisms that have existed less than 12 weeks don't have rights" is just as arbitrary (and unjust) as saying, "Human organisms with black skin don't have rights."
What would convince me that the Earth is 10,000 years old? A complete working replacement of virtually every science known to man, including astronomy, geology, biology, paleontology, etc. etc
OK, but you still haven't given me one solid datum. I don't know enough about those fields to know what kind of assumptions they make, and how sure their conclusions are; and it sounds like, neither do you.
Let's take, for example, the formation of the Grand Canyon. (I'm going out on a limb here because I'm a total layman in the area, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) Geologists know that under normal conditions, the Grand Canyon would take millions of years to erode to its current state. But I remember reading an article in Time awhile back about a geologist who wrote a simulator that was used by nearly all the geological community. The thing was, he was a young-earther; and his simulator proved that, under certain conditions (like, say, the Great Flood described in Genesis), the Grand Canyon could be formed in a much shorter amount of time.
From what the article said, these conditions were somewhat simple, but highly unlikely to occur naturally (something about lava flows pushing up the ocean or something); and that was the main criticism that quoted in the article from other scientists: "Sure, this would happen if the earth suddenly started acting differently for no apparent reason."
Notice the unstated assumption, though? "God never interferes with the physical world; geological processes have always been as they are now." It's a good place to start, but to dogmatically stay there is questionable.
As for the "God meddling at periodic intervals", it depends on how you constrain the meddling. Since God is omnipotent, he could in principle make any such meddling indistinguishable from natural evolution. But we might expect, for instance, that God could insert new species that are unquestionably genetically unrelated to any existing species, and thus don't fit properly into the rest of the hierarchy. If we saw species like that, then the God hypothesis would be more plausible.
There are two problems with the "God made it look this way" argument: one, it's not very convincing (it really is unfalsifiable); and two, it implies that God did things to purposely mislead us, painting him as some kind of a practical joker or tyrant who asks you to believe what contradicts all the evidence.
But in the case of species, I wouldn't expect genetic unrelation at all. One of the things that makes a good coder is how re-usable and how versatile his code is. It's not at all surprising to me that he used similar designs and mechanisms throughout His creation. After all, don't we have shared libraries, similar stack calling conventions, and code conventions? Aren't there standard ways of doing certain common tasks? Why should God re-invent the wheel every time, or write crufty 'code' just to prove that he exists?
If the newly introduced species were completely random and unrelated genetically, it might make some people more disposed to believe in a God (but even that's pretty questionable); but it would make me lose my respect for Him as a great coder and hacker.
america (currently) leads because we (usually) have the foresight to keep barriers out of the way of technological progress. we have slowly overcome nearly every 'religious' boundary by slowly letting people become accustomed to the way this medical technology -improves- life. each time they are accused of wanting to 'play god'. scientists grit and bear the well-intentioned but factually ignorant viewpoint until slowly the advances are accepted.
OK, so you've given one example: that's an awful little from which to generalize. Couldn't the Nazi doctors, who performed experiments on humans, defend themselves the same way?
In general, religion is not opposed to science; most of the things science does are just fine. There are a few kooks who use specious arguments from the Bible to prove this or that scientific fact wrong, but most people have more sense, and realize that the point of the Bible was to teach spiritual truths, not scientific ones.
But this is a matter of morality, and therefore of religion. I'm sure we could advance our knowledge of psychology, physiology, and all kinds of things a great deal if we experimented on prisoners; I'm sure that among the entire population of "life without parole" prisoners, we would have an end to any shortage of suitable organs. Your argument could be used just as well to defend that practice as to defend embryonic stem cell research.
I'm not worried about 'playing god' with DNA -- genetically engineered crops, or even cattle, might be OK as far as I'm concerned. I'm concerned about the fact that these things might possibly be human; and if so, we shouldn't be killing them and performing experiments on them.
The thing is, I've seen a lot of these debates on slashdot, and I haven't seen a good definition of what constitutes "human" or not, just a lot of mocking and ad-hominem attacks on "closed-minded ignorant religious nuts". Why don't you give me a better definition than, "Contains 100% human DNA, and able to be grown into a fully-functional human being." Then I'll concede, and not before.
Yeah, great idea. "We haven't thought at all about whether this is right or wrong, but if people do, they may decide that it's wrong and stop us from doing it. Let's just keep it a secret until we've got something really useful for them, so they'll be tempted to chuck their ethics for a quick cure."
Look, murdering a human being for your own benefit is wrong -- it's a terrible atrocity. Now maybe these things are human beings with intrinsic human rights, and maybe they're just random cells, but until we have a good definition of the difference, we should hold off. Do you have a good definition?
Killing embryos because you're "pretty sure they're not human" is morally equivalent of testing a drug on a group of humans because you're "pretty sure it's not going to kill them." If there are any doubts, you have an obligation to stay your hand.
That's interesting -- these letters basically are spam. It's exactly the same: each one says, "Well, if it doesn't apply, throw it out"; but just as with e-mail, you're transferring the cost to your recipient. Rather than this company paying a human being to review stuff before they send out the e-mail, they're off-loading the expensive processing to the ISPs who really don't have any choice but to pay a human to read and investigate every one.
Seriously, you should find some other ISPs and either do a class-action suit for the lost wages ($100/item consulting fees? At least one hour at the appropriate wage level...) or a lobby to pass a law punishing false C&D letters. If some random private individual gets a C&D, it's just funny; but you're talking some serious stuff going on here.
Tell them that you will release the exploit within 30/60/90 days on Bugtraq, Freenet and Slashdot unless they fix it.
I think timing here is really important: large universities can't just patch software anytime they want -- especially 2 weeks before the end of the semester. I'd send the bug report to the company, and make sure the company has a reasonable time to fix it, and then that the universities have a resonable amount of time for testing and roll-out.
This depends, of course, on how fundamental the bug is... if it's an off-by-one error, a patch should be no problem; but if some if its protocols need to be redesigned, give them more time.
I also understand your desire for anonymity and your fear of being sued; but I think it's really important that the existence of the bug be disclosed publicly as well. You might think about contacting security researchers who have exposed these kinds of bugs before -- Ed Felten or Aviel Rubin, for example. They have bosses who support disclosure, and have the resources to defend them.
The fact that the so-called spiritual world doesn't obey the same laws as the physical world does not logically imply that the spiritual world cannot be repeatably measured. Saying it doesn't follow the laws of physics does not by itself imply that it does not follow any laws. Surely if the spiritual world and physical world can affect each other, then some sort of laws or rules about how they affect each other could be deduced. Unless the spiritual world has no laws at all - if it doesn't, is there any value to it?
No, you're right, different rules doesn't mean they can't be deduced. But the subject area may make experiments difficult, or immoral. We might be able to find out a lot more about psychology if we could perform any experiment we wanted, as many times as we wanted, with as many people as we wanted. But unlike physicists, whose only problem is coming up with an experiment and finding funding, psychologists have ethical issues to deal with.
Furthermore, you're dealing with sentient beings, not bits of matter. If you ask me to pass the salt once, I'll probably hand it to you. But if you ask me 100 times, at the same dinner table, you're likely to get completely different results. And if you ask me for $10 (and I know you) I'll probably give it to you; but if I know you're just trying some experiment on me, the outcome will be different.
It would be the same difficulty if we set up an experiment to determine, say, the effectiveness of prayer. One might think about selecting two hospitals, and getting a bunch of people to pray for the people in one hospital, and not in the other, and seeing if there are any effects. But then, are you really praying for the people in the first hospital because you want them to get better? Do you not *want* the people in the other hospital to get better? And if you were God, would you put up with such flagrant attempts to manipulate you?
Imagine that you had four children, and that you overheard them scheming one day: "Let's see what we can get Dad to do. Why don't we all ask him to paint the house hot pink, and see if there's any correlation between us asking and him giving us what we want." When they all come to you to ask for the pink house, are you likely to give in to their demands? OTOH, if they all discuss it, and genuinely want you to get something for the family, you're much more likely to look favorably on their request.
As an analogy - imagine playing baseball, except that the scores for an inning are determined by the roll of a pair of dice up in a booth. However many runs you score is irrelevant. You may still put effort in to playing because you enjoy it, but as your actions cannot really affect your team's score, then that should never be a motivating factor.
Well, games aren't always that way: consider playing cards, where you're dealt random cards, but you chose how you play them; and you try to infer from probability, and from your opponent's moves, what his cards are and what how he's going to play, and respond as best you can.
But I don't think that's an accurate analogy either. Just because the spiritual world is, from your point of view, "unpredictable" -- i.e., the outcome cannot be predicted 100% by the previous state -- it doesn't mean that it's "completely random". When you ask a girl out, you usually don't know 100% ahead of time whether she's going to say yes; and when you continue to date her to court her affection, you don't know 100% that she'll fall in love with you and say yes when you ask her to marry you. In a sense, that's what makes her love worthwhile, and worth pursuing; if there were a magic formula you could follow that would guarantee her to fall in love with you, it wouldn't be half so valuable. The fact that it's unpredictable doesn't mean it has no correlation to what you do.
I was reading a book on philosophy, and the author was discussing the problem of free will versus determinisum. A
Well, it's hard to define, but most people have a good sense of what I mean when I say that: things like a 'spirit' -- a "ghost in the machine", so to speak, which is the "real you"; God, angels, and demons if you're Judeo-Christian, perhaps other things if you're into some other beliefs which contain spiritual aspects (new age, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc).
For the sake of this discussion, it's probably enough to say that the spiritual world is not made up of the physical world, and not subject to its laws. The physical world, on a moderate-size scale acts newtonian; on a subatomic scale it is quantum, and when things get big (near the speed of light, extremely dense or heavy) things start to get wierd; but (assuming no 'outside' interference) it obeys certain types of rules, is always affected by other things in the physical world in predictable (or probabilistic) ways, so that we can quantify, repeat, and measure it.
The spiritual world is something separate. It can affect the physical world (otherwise it would be completely irrelevant), and be affected by it; but it does not obey the same laws as the physical world, and so cannot be repeatably measured and held under a microscope.
Just like scientists deduce the existence of black holes and dark matter to explain certain phenomena, people have deduced the existence of the spiritual world to deal with things like meaning and purpose, free will, morality, and the sense that there's Something Else out there.
As for science proving or disproving the existance of "God", of course it's not possible. The concept of deities are that they are based on faith. You can't prove faith. It's like me trying to prove that my neice's imaginary friend does or does not exist. He might not exist for ME, but she sure thinks he does.
I'm glad you Christians have your faith and all.
Well, no, that's not quite it. Science can't prove or disprove the existence of God for the same reason they can't prove or disprove *your* existence or that your senses are usually trustworthy, and can't prove that your mother loves you. Science is an attemp to explain physical phenomena using exclusively physical means; therefore the spiritual world, including God, is outside of its scope.
Yet you still believe, or at least act like your senses are trustworthy; you have strong personal convictions about relationships and things that you're willing to believe, even though you can't adequately defend them to some skeptic.
I believe in God, and specifically Christianity, because it is the best explanation I've found to account for my experience in life thus far.
That's where the young-earth creationists are coming from too. They've experienced first-hand the spiritual truths in the Bible; it affects their daily life. Hey haven't seen or experienced evolution, nor does it really help them to live daily.
So they make the understandable conclusion, that all the literal statements in the Bible, on every subject, are as true as the spiritual truths they've seen and experienced.
Personally, I don't know. I have a friend who's a biologist and a very strong Christian, who believes in evolution. I know that a lot of people use 'evolution' to try to disprove God & the Bible; I also know that science is defined in such a way as to have a huge blind spot -- namely, if there actually is a spiritual world, then many of its conclusions and predictions may be just plain wrong. If there is no spiritual world, then evolution is probably the best explanation for what we see.
But whether the literal one-week scenario described in genesis is true or not, the spiritual truths found in the creation account: about God's attitude toward his creation and towards us, is certainly true. That's what affects my daily life, not whether some fossil is really 6,000 or 6,000,000,000 years old.
Err... if a theory is not falsifiable, it is certainly not a useful theory, scientifically speaking.
Just out of curiosity, is evolution falsifiable? In most of the discussions I've seen between people challenging the orthodoxy of the day (evolution), when sticky points are made, people fall back and say, "Well, something like this *must* have happened, so the details will be worked out eventually." Which sounds suspiciously like the young-earthers who say, "Well, we know that creation happened this way, so all the sticky details will be worked out eventually."
Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that the "young earth creation" hypothesis (which is not the only creationist theory out there) were true. What kind of evidence would it take to convince the scientific establishment that the earth really was created 10,000 years ago by an intelligent being?
Or alternately, suppose that one of the "older earth" creationist theories were true: the earth really is as old as geologists say it is, and what we see as punctuated equilibria was really God supernaturally introducing new species at different points in time. What kind of evidence would it take to convince you that such a theory is true?
The problem is that people automatically associate the word "science" with "proven to be true"; and scientists don't tend to discourage that assessment. But it should be obvious that completely neglecting certain hypotheses only because they're not "scientifically useful", or defining science in a way that assumes from the outset no interaction between the material and the physical world, means that it's possible for "science" to diverge greatly from the truth.
If every high school science class started with the caveat, "Science is an attempt to explain the world in terms of exclusively physical phenomena. This means that if there really is a spiritual world, many of its conclusions may be completely wrong", I would have no trouble with teaching only Evolution in science class.
You know, I gotta say I'm with you on the "frog in an apron"; but he does have butterfly wings. Maybe it's just becaues I read your post before seeing the article. ("Too many users")
Here's mine:
Person with hands behind back looking at feet
Headboard or a bed
Bob the Tomato, from Veggie Tales
Comfy slippers
Arab looking in a mirror
Monkey doing telepathy
Frog with wings in apron
RC controllers
Baboon doing telepathy
Sinus cavity
A couple hit and stick right away, but others (#3, for instance) took me awhile to get anything, and I forgot it almost right away. I think for those you'd have to spend some time imprinting to make it work.
In this situation, think like the Oracle in the Matrix: "She told you what you needed to hear." God is about justice and beauty and all that, but one of the things he wants most is for men to love him and be in relationship with him.
Is there any reason for God to come drop by Abraham's place before going to destroy Sodom? Not like he couldn't take the direct route. But it's obvious from the conversation that ensues that this was an issue Abraham was really struggling with. If God had simply gone and destroyed Sodom, without this conversation with Abraham, he would have doubted; in the back of his mind, he'd have this gnawing question: "What if there were innocent people in there? What if there were 50 innocent people? It just doesn't seem right." And the typical struggle: his super-id telling him that whatever God does is right, because he's God, don't question him, don't doubt, it's a sin. But it would have come between him and God, it would have been there whenever he prayed, and whenever he worshipped.
So God, knowing this, comes and decides to get it out in the open. He lets Abraham know what he's going to do; and he lets him bring up the thing that's on his heart. He doesn't push the conversation, or rebuke; he lets Abraham get everything off his heart that he needs, so that when Sodom is destroyed, he can glorify God, not only knowing in his head that God is just, but seeing it as true with the eyes of his heart.
And not only was he given knowledge of God's justice, he had the experience of coming to God with an honest doubt, and not being rebuffed. There are some things that must be done, not just known about, even if they be only actions of the heart and mind, to grow; and God "pretends", so to speak, in order to make us do these things, so that we can grow.
I'd actually be much more suspicious of the Bible if it was exactly what I expected, if it never confused or offended me. I would think it was simply propiganda, or just made up. The fact that Moses put this in there, and that nobody's chucked it out after 3-4000 years, ought to give you some more confidence that the stuff they're talking about is true, not just brainwashing.
Note also that the class action suit was not really based on the merits of DirectTVs case - they accused DirectTV of extortion.
And even that case seems to have been thrown out on a technicality... the letters sent threatening to sue were "part of the litigation" and therefore "legally protected" -- which, I assume, means that they can't be used in another case, or some such hoo-ya.
I'm really surpised California doesn't have anti-barratry laws or something to compensate for that... if they do, and the attourneys still cried 'extortion', they probably didnt' do their homework -- and aren't worht the $100k. =)
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply here, this isn't a criminal case, it's a civil case...
Huh? So the fact that you're merely going to have to sell your house and your car and declare bankruptcy to pay off the $100,000 in "damages", or waste a lot of your free time and money, maybe get a second mortgage on your home to pay the attourney, instead of going to jail, means that a fundamental human right doesn't apply?
I was just thinking that lawsuits like these would be much better if you could make the "right to an attourney" plea to get a court-appointed attourney. That way, in situations where there's no possible evidence, but the cost of settling ($3500) is a whole lot less than the cost of a lawyer (anyone have some figures?), the little guy at least has a chance...
I, too believe in fair use, and the balance of rights. But that's just not what is happening on KaZaA et al, and you know it. "Fair use" and "providing copyrighted material for download on a P2P network" are about as dissimilar as you can get.
OK, how about this: I have my entire CD collection on my computer at work; since it has a continual connecetion to the internet, I have them on a website. The URL to this website is secret, not linked to anywhere; and I don't link out (so I don't end up in 'referrer logs'). I have other things on the site that get search hits regularly, but not my personal music collection, so I'm pretty sure it hasn't made it to any search engines yet.
Why? So I can play it anywhere I'm connected to the internet -- I can stream it at home, or at whatever random computer I happen to be working; if I'm at someone's house and want to talk about a tune, I can just go to the site and d/l play it, without lugging my CD's everywhere I go.
I also give the URL to friends. It's legal for me to make a tape mix of CDs and give it to friends (Home Audio Recording Act of 1994, I believe), and although it's not technically legal, I think it's in the same spirit of free use to allow me to share my music with close friends & family (not random people on the internet).
Am I a felon?
What's really missing is a way to prosecute low-cost federal crimes. The same problem the RIAA has getting the FBI to track down a file-sharer who has uploaded 5-6 songs, worth $5.30 (x download 10 times, == $53 or something) is the problem that system administrators have getting the FBI to hunt down script kiddies who break into your system but don't cause $10,000 worth of damage, or hunt down that jerk on e-bay who defrauded you out of $1000 (still less than $10K!).
(I forget what the actual minimum is, but it' something along those lines. It sounds like that's part of what this bill is about -- it 'defines' putting a file online for download as "making 10 copies of a work worth $2500 over 180 days", so that the FBI's threshold of investigation can be met, when it's clearly not.)
Well, and frankly there are more important issues to me than P2p sharing. It's a simple fact of life: In the 2000 presidential elections, I could not vote both pro-life and anti-microsoft. I think Microsoft really deserves to burn, and Gore probably would've finished the job Clinton started; but if I have a choice between letting microsoft off the hook and letting innocent children die at the whim of their mothers, the choice is pretty clear to me.
Imagine voting for Douglas (or whoever it was) instead of Lincon back in the day: "Well, I'm against slavery, but you know, Douglas has a really great educational plan..." Uh-huh.
Detroit's a big union town too, which means they tend to vote more Democrat; and it's got a large population of blacks, and the Democratic party has somehow convinced them that Republicans are all racist and want to bring back segregation. (That's a shot at the Democrats for taking advantage of a deep-rooted and understandable fear for political gain, not at blacks.)
Do you condone the illegal trade of copyrighted material?
If you answered "no" to either of the two questions above, this bill is for you.
I condone a punishment appropriate for the crime. As someome pointed out earlier, physically stealing a CD from a music store is a misdemeanor; this makes putting up a copy of a file a felony. Does this make any sense?
I also believe in fair use (i.e., legal copying of copyrighted material without the owner's consent), and in a balance between the rights of creators and the public. A little civil disobedience can be a good thing.
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Most people just don't send enough mail in a day to have it be a big problem, but listservs might require a different solution.
Yes, it would be incredibly stupid to try to make a chromatic scale all on the same interval using anything but even temperment; it just doesnt' add up.
But that doesn't mean you can't make a normal scale that sounds good (in fact, REALLY good, since you're used to even temperment being just a bit 'out of tune' [i.e., all the intervals have a little 'wolf' in them so that none have a lot]) in one key based on simple whole-number ratios. You just can't change key...
Sounds like an interesting book, I may have to check it out sometime.
Huh? I thought the Pythagorean scale was based on whole-number ratios: An octave is 2:1, a fifth is 3:2, a fourth is 4:3, etc. But if you do the math, 3/2 * 4/3 == 4/2 == 2/1, so the octaves are still in tune.
Actually, brass instruments naturally hit notes on the pythagorean scale (if that's what this is) becaues they actually do use harmonics; thus to play in tune with a piano (or with another instrument using another fundamental note) they have to adjust slightly based on what harmonic they're using. Thus I remember my HS band director telling the trumpets to 'lip up' their E's, because the instrument tended to make them flat; in other words, 'just temperment' 3rd ratio is smaller than the 'even-tempered' 3rd ratio. But all the open C's on a trumpet, no matter what octave, are always perfectly in tune with each other (as long as the musician's lips are in good shape).
I think what you may be talking about is when you tune a piano using only one interval -- i.e., tune the C; then tune the G to be a perfect 5th to the C, tune the D to be perfect to the G, tune the A to be perfect to the D, etc; in that case, when you finally get around to C again, you'll have an awful howling, because the just tempered 5th (i.e., 3:2) is a tad too large; even temper makes it a bit flatter, so that it all adds up.
It just seems strange to me, that things are this way... in order to be able to play in all keys, you have to make all keys sound slightly out of tune (or adjust on-the-fly, if you can). I'm sure there's a moral there somewhere...
Yes, that's exactly what it is; but the reason people are doing this is because there is no other recourse. If there were justice, there would be no need for SPEWS; so until we do get justice against spammers, we're going to have terrorism and vigilantism, with all the nastiness that goes along with it.
I'm sorry that your business was hurt by this spammer on your ISP; I'm also sorry that my mom got an e-mail with a wide array of penises on it. I'm also sorry that I don't dare put my e-mail address in public places for real people to contact me because of something they've seen on my website or something I've said (which I'd enjoy), for fear that I'll get on 100x as many spam lists as I am now. I'm sorry for all the time I waste tweaking spam filters and grepping through my 'reject bin' when I could be doing something useful, and I'm sorry for all the mail I never look at, because it didn't happen to be whitelisted and I lost it in all the junk.
No, that's not the case, for one simple reason: MS is a monopoly. It's not a level playing field: as people have pointed out, they have the ability to automatically include Messenger in their operating system, which gives them a gigantic levarage over any other messenger service.
It's 100% clear that Microsoft wants to dominate every interesting aspect of computing; and they're doing that by illegally leveraging their power in one area to gain power in another area. If they simply put the Messenger client on some site and let people download it, then they'd be in the same boat as AIM or ICQ; it would grow or shrink based only on its merits / popularity.
Intel is in the same position, and treads a lot more carefully. There's a lot of things they don't do -- things that they could do if they were AMD or Transmeta -- simply to avoid raising anti-trust suspicions. If our government had any sense / balls, Microsoft would be dead by now for its violations.
You're right, it does cost money to maintain a service, and GAIM and other 3rd-party software doesn't make them any money; but AIM has opened its spec (to a degree, anyway) -- the only reason Microsoft can afford to do this is because it also controls the OS of 90% of desktop machines out there.
Yeah, but he wrote the SMP stuff for 2.4, on Caldera's dollar. So maybe he's heading for the hills before it's too late...
Hmm, I'd have to disagree. For just the two days that we were out, it's not a big deal... it's actually kind of novel, an adventure. But it sounds like you weren't here:
- You can't cook anything if you have an electric stove. Sure, you can live off peanut butter & jelly, and canned tuna for a few days; but that's going to get old really quick. Lunch meats & cheese spoil. Some people are lucky enough to have charcoal or gas grill, but you can't store it for more than a day or two, and neither can stores.
- It's really tough to buy gasoline. There were only a handful of places with power to run the pumps or the credit card machines, and at some point everyone realized, "Hey, I have only about a 1/4 tank of gas, and this may last more than a day..." and rushed to the gas stations to wait in long lines.
- You can't access your e-mail, the internet, watch TV, listen to the radio (unless you have battery-powered radio, or in your car; but remember, gas is hard to come by, and batteries only last so long). Even if you can listen to the radio, most of the radio stations are out; those that are on are talking about the power outage. Now, I don't really watch that much TV or play many games, so I have many ways of seeking entertainment that don't require electricity; but how many Americans are used to doing that?
- There is no A/C, no fans, no ice, and after a day the water from the tap wasn't potable: it was pretty hot and humid, with no relief.
In the winter, because most heating systems have electronic switches, there would be no heat either (though that's easier to deal with: everybody has coats and blankets).
- Think of all the economic havoc that's going to be wreaked. The entire production of the city of Detroit was shut down for at least a day! This is going to reverberate through the stock markets and financial things pretty soon.
Anyway, the point of terrorism isn't to kill people; the point of terrorism is to make large amounts of people live in fear of something, and through this to put pressure on the goverment. Imagine that Al Qaida managed to do this once a month without being caught, each time demanding, "Pull US troops out of the Holy Land of Mecca!" How many months do you think it would be before popular demand to remove troops from Mecca would be deafening?[Sorry for the delay in response, I'm in the Detroit area, so I haven't had e-mail for a couple of days.]
Now I have a definition, but the ambiguity isn't gone yet. What exactly constitutes a 'fully functional human being'? Is a new-born baby 'fully functional'? What about 20 minutes before it's born? It certainly can't talk, walk, or do any of the other things which we attribute to full-grown humans. Is it OK to experiment on them? What about toddlers who can't talk, or pre-teens who haven't gone through puberty yet. They can talk and walk, but they can't reproduce yet.
And what if I become blind? What if I lose a leg? What if I don't have the mental capacity to read words bigger than 4 letters? Am I still 'fully functional', or can I be torn apart for someone else's benefit?
And turning it around, isn't an embryo fully functional? It's alive and growing, doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing at that stage of development. There's nothing broken about it at all. How is it not 'fully functional'? If the embryo "couldn't exist outside of a host", then the embryonic stem cells would be useless. If you mean, "Will die without some sort of external interference", a newborn baby is in the exact same boat.
So you see, you haven't done anything at all to bring clarity. Give me a consistent definition that gives all the right answers to the above questions.
Saying, "Human organisms inside someone else's body don't have rights" or "Human organisms that have existed less than 12 weeks don't have rights" is just as arbitrary (and unjust) as saying, "Human organisms with black skin don't have rights."
OK, but you still haven't given me one solid datum. I don't know enough about those fields to know what kind of assumptions they make, and how sure their conclusions are; and it sounds like, neither do you.
Let's take, for example, the formation of the Grand Canyon. (I'm going out on a limb here because I'm a total layman in the area, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) Geologists know that under normal conditions, the Grand Canyon would take millions of years to erode to its current state. But I remember reading an article in Time awhile back about a geologist who wrote a simulator that was used by nearly all the geological community. The thing was, he was a young-earther; and his simulator proved that, under certain conditions (like, say, the Great Flood described in Genesis), the Grand Canyon could be formed in a much shorter amount of time.
From what the article said, these conditions were somewhat simple, but highly unlikely to occur naturally (something about lava flows pushing up the ocean or something); and that was the main criticism that quoted in the article from other scientists: "Sure, this would happen if the earth suddenly started acting differently for no apparent reason."
Notice the unstated assumption, though? "God never interferes with the physical world; geological processes have always been as they are now." It's a good place to start, but to dogmatically stay there is questionable.
There are two problems with the "God made it look this way" argument: one, it's not very convincing (it really is unfalsifiable); and two, it implies that God did things to purposely mislead us, painting him as some kind of a practical joker or tyrant who asks you to believe what contradicts all the evidence.
But in the case of species, I wouldn't expect genetic unrelation at all. One of the things that makes a good coder is how re-usable and how versatile his code is. It's not at all surprising to me that he used similar designs and mechanisms throughout His creation. After all, don't we have shared libraries, similar stack calling conventions, and code conventions? Aren't there standard ways of doing certain common tasks? Why should God re-invent the wheel every time, or write crufty 'code' just to prove that he exists?
If the newly introduced species were completely random and unrelated genetically, it might make some people more disposed to believe in a God (but even that's pretty questionable); but it would make me lose my respect for Him as a great coder and hacker.
OK, so you've given one example: that's an awful little from which to generalize. Couldn't the Nazi doctors, who performed experiments on humans, defend themselves the same way?
In general, religion is not opposed to science; most of the things science does are just fine. There are a few kooks who use specious arguments from the Bible to prove this or that scientific fact wrong, but most people have more sense, and realize that the point of the Bible was to teach spiritual truths, not scientific ones.
But this is a matter of morality, and therefore of religion. I'm sure we could advance our knowledge of psychology, physiology, and all kinds of things a great deal if we experimented on prisoners; I'm sure that among the entire population of "life without parole" prisoners, we would have an end to any shortage of suitable organs. Your argument could be used just as well to defend that practice as to defend embryonic stem cell research.
I'm not worried about 'playing god' with DNA -- genetically engineered crops, or even cattle, might be OK as far as I'm concerned. I'm concerned about the fact that these things might possibly be human; and if so, we shouldn't be killing them and performing experiments on them.
The thing is, I've seen a lot of these debates on slashdot, and I haven't seen a good definition of what constitutes "human" or not, just a lot of mocking and ad-hominem attacks on "closed-minded ignorant religious nuts". Why don't you give me a better definition than, "Contains 100% human DNA, and able to be grown into a fully-functional human being." Then I'll concede, and not before.
Look, murdering a human being for your own benefit is wrong -- it's a terrible atrocity. Now maybe these things are human beings with intrinsic human rights, and maybe they're just random cells, but until we have a good definition of the difference, we should hold off. Do you have a good definition?
Killing embryos because you're "pretty sure they're not human" is morally equivalent of testing a drug on a group of humans because you're "pretty sure it's not going to kill them." If there are any doubts, you have an obligation to stay your hand.
Seriously, you should find some other ISPs and either do a class-action suit for the lost wages ($100/item consulting fees? At least one hour at the appropriate wage level...) or a lobby to pass a law punishing false C&D letters. If some random private individual gets a C&D, it's just funny; but you're talking some serious stuff going on here.
I think timing here is really important: large universities can't just patch software anytime they want -- especially 2 weeks before the end of the semester. I'd send the bug report to the company, and make sure the company has a reasonable time to fix it, and then that the universities have a resonable amount of time for testing and roll-out.
This depends, of course, on how fundamental the bug is... if it's an off-by-one error, a patch should be no problem; but if some if its protocols need to be redesigned, give them more time.
I also understand your desire for anonymity and your fear of being sued; but I think it's really important that the existence of the bug be disclosed publicly as well. You might think about contacting security researchers who have exposed these kinds of bugs before -- Ed Felten or Aviel Rubin, for example. They have bosses who support disclosure, and have the resources to defend them.
No, you're right, different rules doesn't mean they can't be deduced. But the subject area may make experiments difficult, or immoral. We might be able to find out a lot more about psychology if we could perform any experiment we wanted, as many times as we wanted, with as many people as we wanted. But unlike physicists, whose only problem is coming up with an experiment and finding funding, psychologists have ethical issues to deal with.
Furthermore, you're dealing with sentient beings, not bits of matter. If you ask me to pass the salt once, I'll probably hand it to you. But if you ask me 100 times, at the same dinner table, you're likely to get completely different results. And if you ask me for $10 (and I know you) I'll probably give it to you; but if I know you're just trying some experiment on me, the outcome will be different.
It would be the same difficulty if we set up an experiment to determine, say, the effectiveness of prayer. One might think about selecting two hospitals, and getting a bunch of people to pray for the people in one hospital, and not in the other, and seeing if there are any effects. But then, are you really praying for the people in the first hospital because you want them to get better? Do you not *want* the people in the other hospital to get better? And if you were God, would you put up with such flagrant attempts to manipulate you?
Imagine that you had four children, and that you overheard them scheming one day: "Let's see what we can get Dad to do. Why don't we all ask him to paint the house hot pink, and see if there's any correlation between us asking and him giving us what we want." When they all come to you to ask for the pink house, are you likely to give in to their demands? OTOH, if they all discuss it, and genuinely want you to get something for the family, you're much more likely to look favorably on their request.
Well, games aren't always that way: consider playing cards, where you're dealt random cards, but you chose how you play them; and you try to infer from probability, and from your opponent's moves, what his cards are and what how he's going to play, and respond as best you can.
But I don't think that's an accurate analogy either. Just because the spiritual world is, from your point of view, "unpredictable" -- i.e., the outcome cannot be predicted 100% by the previous state -- it doesn't mean that it's "completely random". When you ask a girl out, you usually don't know 100% ahead of time whether she's going to say yes; and when you continue to date her to court her affection, you don't know 100% that she'll fall in love with you and say yes when you ask her to marry you. In a sense, that's what makes her love worthwhile, and worth pursuing; if there were a magic formula you could follow that would guarantee her to fall in love with you, it wouldn't be half so valuable. The fact that it's unpredictable doesn't mean it has no correlation to what you do.
I was reading a book on philosophy, and the author was discussing the problem of free will versus determinisum. A
For the sake of this discussion, it's probably enough to say that the spiritual world is not made up of the physical world, and not subject to its laws. The physical world, on a moderate-size scale acts newtonian; on a subatomic scale it is quantum, and when things get big (near the speed of light, extremely dense or heavy) things start to get wierd; but (assuming no 'outside' interference) it obeys certain types of rules, is always affected by other things in the physical world in predictable (or probabilistic) ways, so that we can quantify, repeat, and measure it.
The spiritual world is something separate. It can affect the physical world (otherwise it would be completely irrelevant), and be affected by it; but it does not obey the same laws as the physical world, and so cannot be repeatably measured and held under a microscope.
Just like scientists deduce the existence of black holes and dark matter to explain certain phenomena, people have deduced the existence of the spiritual world to deal with things like meaning and purpose, free will, morality, and the sense that there's Something Else out there.
Well, no, that's not quite it. Science can't prove or disprove the existence of God for the same reason they can't prove or disprove *your* existence or that your senses are usually trustworthy, and can't prove that your mother loves you. Science is an attemp to explain physical phenomena using exclusively physical means; therefore the spiritual world, including God, is outside of its scope.
Yet you still believe, or at least act like your senses are trustworthy; you have strong personal convictions about relationships and things that you're willing to believe, even though you can't adequately defend them to some skeptic.
I believe in God, and specifically Christianity, because it is the best explanation I've found to account for my experience in life thus far.
That's where the young-earth creationists are coming from too. They've experienced first-hand the spiritual truths in the Bible; it affects their daily life. Hey haven't seen or experienced evolution, nor does it really help them to live daily. So they make the understandable conclusion, that all the literal statements in the Bible, on every subject, are as true as the spiritual truths they've seen and experienced.
Personally, I don't know. I have a friend who's a biologist and a very strong Christian, who believes in evolution. I know that a lot of people use 'evolution' to try to disprove God & the Bible; I also know that science is defined in such a way as to have a huge blind spot -- namely, if there actually is a spiritual world, then many of its conclusions and predictions may be just plain wrong. If there is no spiritual world, then evolution is probably the best explanation for what we see.
But whether the literal one-week scenario described in genesis is true or not, the spiritual truths found in the creation account: about God's attitude toward his creation and towards us, is certainly true. That's what affects my daily life, not whether some fossil is really 6,000 or 6,000,000,000 years old.
Just out of curiosity, is evolution falsifiable? In most of the discussions I've seen between people challenging the orthodoxy of the day (evolution), when sticky points are made, people fall back and say, "Well, something like this *must* have happened, so the details will be worked out eventually." Which sounds suspiciously like the young-earthers who say, "Well, we know that creation happened this way, so all the sticky details will be worked out eventually."
Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that the "young earth creation" hypothesis (which is not the only creationist theory out there) were true. What kind of evidence would it take to convince the scientific establishment that the earth really was created 10,000 years ago by an intelligent being?
Or alternately, suppose that one of the "older earth" creationist theories were true: the earth really is as old as geologists say it is, and what we see as punctuated equilibria was really God supernaturally introducing new species at different points in time. What kind of evidence would it take to convince you that such a theory is true?
The problem is that people automatically associate the word "science" with "proven to be true"; and scientists don't tend to discourage that assessment. But it should be obvious that completely neglecting certain hypotheses only because they're not "scientifically useful", or defining science in a way that assumes from the outset no interaction between the material and the physical world, means that it's possible for "science" to diverge greatly from the truth.
If every high school science class started with the caveat, "Science is an attempt to explain the world in terms of exclusively physical phenomena. This means that if there really is a spiritual world, many of its conclusions may be completely wrong", I would have no trouble with teaching only Evolution in science class.
Here's mine:
A couple hit and stick right away, but others (#3, for instance) took me awhile to get anything, and I forgot it almost right away. I think for those you'd have to spend some time imprinting to make it work.
Is there any reason for God to come drop by Abraham's place before going to destroy Sodom? Not like he couldn't take the direct route. But it's obvious from the conversation that ensues that this was an issue Abraham was really struggling with. If God had simply gone and destroyed Sodom, without this conversation with Abraham, he would have doubted; in the back of his mind, he'd have this gnawing question: "What if there were innocent people in there? What if there were 50 innocent people? It just doesn't seem right." And the typical struggle: his super-id telling him that whatever God does is right, because he's God, don't question him, don't doubt, it's a sin. But it would have come between him and God, it would have been there whenever he prayed, and whenever he worshipped.
So God, knowing this, comes and decides to get it out in the open. He lets Abraham know what he's going to do; and he lets him bring up the thing that's on his heart. He doesn't push the conversation, or rebuke; he lets Abraham get everything off his heart that he needs, so that when Sodom is destroyed, he can glorify God, not only knowing in his head that God is just, but seeing it as true with the eyes of his heart.
And not only was he given knowledge of God's justice, he had the experience of coming to God with an honest doubt, and not being rebuffed. There are some things that must be done, not just known about, even if they be only actions of the heart and mind, to grow; and God "pretends", so to speak, in order to make us do these things, so that we can grow.
I'd actually be much more suspicious of the Bible if it was exactly what I expected, if it never confused or offended me. I would think it was simply propiganda, or just made up. The fact that Moses put this in there, and that nobody's chucked it out after 3-4000 years, ought to give you some more confidence that the stuff they're talking about is true, not just brainwashing.
Yes, Michigan! I feel better now -- it just about makes up for the stupid anti-P2P law one of our guys is pushing in congress...
And even that case seems to have been thrown out on a technicality... the letters sent threatening to sue were "part of the litigation" and therefore "legally protected" -- which, I assume, means that they can't be used in another case, or some such hoo-ya.
I'm really surpised California doesn't have anti-barratry laws or something to compensate for that... if they do, and the attourneys still cried 'extortion', they probably didnt' do their homework -- and aren't worht the $100k. =)
Huh? So the fact that you're merely going to have to sell your house and your car and declare bankruptcy to pay off the $100,000 in "damages", or waste a lot of your free time and money, maybe get a second mortgage on your home to pay the attourney, instead of going to jail, means that a fundamental human right doesn't apply?
I was just thinking that lawsuits like these would be much better if you could make the "right to an attourney" plea to get a court-appointed attourney. That way, in situations where there's no possible evidence, but the cost of settling ($3500) is a whole lot less than the cost of a lawyer (anyone have some figures?), the little guy at least has a chance...
Why? So I can play it anywhere I'm connected to the internet -- I can stream it at home, or at whatever random computer I happen to be working; if I'm at someone's house and want to talk about a tune, I can just go to the site and d/l play it, without lugging my CD's everywhere I go.
I also give the URL to friends. It's legal for me to make a tape mix of CDs and give it to friends (Home Audio Recording Act of 1994, I believe), and although it's not technically legal, I think it's in the same spirit of free use to allow me to share my music with close friends & family (not random people on the internet).
Am I a felon?
What's really missing is a way to prosecute low-cost federal crimes. The same problem the RIAA has getting the FBI to track down a file-sharer who has uploaded 5-6 songs, worth $5.30 (x download 10 times, == $53 or something) is the problem that system administrators have getting the FBI to hunt down script kiddies who break into your system but don't cause $10,000 worth of damage, or hunt down that jerk on e-bay who defrauded you out of $1000 (still less than $10K!).
(I forget what the actual minimum is, but it' something along those lines. It sounds like that's part of what this bill is about -- it 'defines' putting a file online for download as "making 10 copies of a work worth $2500 over 180 days", so that the FBI's threshold of investigation can be met, when it's clearly not.)
Imagine voting for Douglas (or whoever it was) instead of Lincon back in the day: "Well, I'm against slavery, but you know, Douglas has a really great educational plan..." Uh-huh.
Detroit's a big union town too, which means they tend to vote more Democrat; and it's got a large population of blacks, and the Democratic party has somehow convinced them that Republicans are all racist and want to bring back segregation. (That's a shot at the Democrats for taking advantage of a deep-rooted and understandable fear for political gain, not at blacks.)
I also believe in fair use (i.e., legal copying of copyrighted material without the owner's consent), and in a balance between the rights of creators and the public. A little civil disobedience can be a good thing.