You seem to have missed the subtle wit of the original statement.
By definition, an atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist. Fighting against something that you believe does not exist is absurd. Fighting against the belief in the existence of something that you believe does not exist is not the same as fighting against the thing that you believe does not exist.</pedantic>
The point of his proposal was investing into the heavy up-front R&D needed to develop an economically effective alternative to oil.
If such were developed, it would not only be used in the US, but throughout the industrialized (and industrializing) world, and as a result lower the worldwide oil prices to the point where oil is at least as cost-effective as the new technology, which may well be $10/barrel if not less.
If all you have is $200, you don't need a fraud-protected bank account. Not to mention that such a card would cost less than $1 to manufacture by the time the banking system would actually get around to implementing something like this.
I have tried using the built-in sound on my A8N-SLI Premium, and it's noticeably worse than the sound from my old machine's Audigy 1 even on my ancient 2+sub speaker setup, so I wouldn't exactly call the board's sound good (though it may well be better than other manufacturers' built-in solutions). There's occasional distortion while playing World of Warcraft, for example, and my mp3s don't quite seem to have as much depth to them as they used to, though that may well be subjective.
There are many excellent reasons to go with the ASUS board (stability, room for the largest heatsinks, passively cooled chipset, etc), but I wouldn't consider sound to be one of them. I haven't had time yet to run benchmarks to compare performance differences between the integrated sound and the Audigy, but as wretched as Creative's drivers may be, in my experience their hardware does deliver superior sound quality.
Indeed, the Soviet engineer's salary was so small, it spawned its own genre of humor. And yet they still managed to maintain nuclear parity with the West, get men into space, and build cars that would start (with some coaxing) in -20C cold. All in the face of a crippling bureaucracy that made PHBs look like renaissance men.
Apparently he didn't know how to use.htaccess files when it started either. I hear there is a neat little website out there that can get you all sorts of useful information.
Simple, you use a software tool like rsnapshot to take regular incremental snapshots of the relevant filesystems to the RAID.
RAID is a perfectly reasonable backup solution from a hardware point of view. It protects you from drive failure, gives you quick access, and is currently the best bang for your buck if you have non-negligible amounts of data to back up.
Of course if all you do is overwrite a single snapshot every night, all that protects you from is drive failure on the main machine, but that is a software issue. There are plenty of bone-headed ways to back up to tape as well, and as has been established, optical is far from reliable when it comes to long-term storage.
My guess is that the statistical analysis happens not just on the word level but on the sentence level. This means that the system would handle idioms almost perfectly when there are corresponding idioms in the target language, and adequately even when there aren't any (since the hard work of coming up with standard translations for those has already been done by several generations of UN translators). There should be very high correlations between the occurrence of "God helps those who help themselves" in English and "berezhonogo Bog berezhot" in Russian, for example.
I'd be more worried about homonyms, especially ones that are used in the similar contexts. I wonder if it will be able to handle sentences like "I turn left here, right?", which manage to confuse even humans at times.
I believe the content stopped being theirs as soon as they released it into the world. As the Russian saying goes, a word is not a sparrow, once it flies out there's no catching it. I can see no justification on either the intuitive moral level or the pragmatic utilitarian level that would make giving anyone full exclusive control over any arrangement of notes, words, pixels, or atoms a good idea, even if they were the first to produce or describe such an arrangement.
Now, a case can be made for giving the original creators control over the rights to buy, sell, lease, or otherwise make a profit from the information in order to provide a financial motive for creating useful information. Governments have been regulating commerce for as long as there have been governments, so there's nothing peculiar about that. If *AA wants to go after the guys selling bootleg DVDs on street corners, more power to them.
However, the establishment of the concept of intellectual property creates fertile ground for an assault on the free exchange of information, which is liable to cause far greater harm to society than any benefit derived from the financial incentive to produce new information.
It doesn't make it impossible for them to shut down a torrent, it simply makes it much harder. Instead of having a single site to shut down (the one hosting the tracker) in order to kill the torrent, they now have to shut down everyone with a complete copy (every seed).
This can number into hundreds or thousands of users, with the number constantly changing as people finish their downloads. And if one or more of those seeds happens to be in a foreign country, it may take months or be outright impossible to shut the torrent down.
The discovery was the fact that these animals were a previously uncatalogued species belonging to a previously uncatalogued family, not the fact that these animals existed.
I think you can stop beating this horse now, seeing as it's already dead and all. Yes, Firefox used to have a rendering bug, which is now largely fixed. This does not in any way, shape, or form negate the allegation that Slashcode is a festering cesspool of standards non-compliance.
I think it's about time to stop arguing a no longer relevant point and go back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing and Soviet Russia jokes.
I'll start: in Soviet Russia dead horse beats you!
Why exactly would I care what someone presenting an argument actually believes in? An argument should be evaluated on its own merits if one is to evaluate it rationally. A discussion, especially one of such grave importance as the discussion of law, should not be a contest between people, but a contest of ideas. It is precisely that tendency to put people ahead of ideas that makes rational debate degenerate into manipulative rhetoric and mindless sloganeering.
And no, that was not a hidden assumption, that was an indication of purpose. Too much of our current policy is made by charlatans and for idiots. I believe that the format of discussion should be manipulated in such a way as to minimize the impact of rhetoric, demagoguery, and other attempts at emotional manipulation. Policy should be implemented because it makes sense, not because of the personalities pushing it.
Why is it relevant how a particular law affects someone who advocates it? The only thing that should matter to you when you are discussing a particular law is how that law affects you and whether the law makes sense from your frame of reference.
I think it is safe to assume that those whom the law helps (or whom it doesn't harm) will advocate for it, and those whom it hurts will advocate against it, and that truth will come out of the discussion if the discussion stays rational for the duration.
I beg to differ. My friend's genius of a little brother has successfully killed a CRT monitor, and HDD, and plenty o other computer parts with a magnetic screwdriver.
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By definition, an atheist is someone who believes that God does not exist. Fighting against something that you believe does not exist is absurd. Fighting against the belief in the existence of something that you believe does not exist is not the same as fighting against the thing that you believe does not exist.</pedantic>
If such were developed, it would not only be used in the US, but throughout the industrialized (and industrializing) world, and as a result lower the worldwide oil prices to the point where oil is at least as cost-effective as the new technology, which may well be $10/barrel if not less.
If all you have is $200, you don't need a fraud-protected bank account. Not to mention that such a card would cost less than $1 to manufacture by the time the banking system would actually get around to implementing something like this.
However, focusing on being happy in the present tends to lead to being unhappy in the future, which will become the present all too soon.
There are many excellent reasons to go with the ASUS board (stability, room for the largest heatsinks, passively cooled chipset, etc), but I wouldn't consider sound to be one of them. I haven't had time yet to run benchmarks to compare performance differences between the integrated sound and the Audigy, but as wretched as Creative's drivers may be, in my experience their hardware does deliver superior sound quality.
Nothing wrong with being a pompous asshole if you happen to be right
Indeed, the Soviet engineer's salary was so small, it spawned its own genre of humor. And yet they still managed to maintain nuclear parity with the West, get men into space, and build cars that would start (with some coaxing) in -20C cold. All in the face of a crippling bureaucracy that made PHBs look like renaissance men.
Oh, whom am I kidding? Any post that starts with a "bzzzt" can't avoid being a troll, no matter what the following content might happen to be.
Apparently he didn't know how to use .htaccess files when it started either. I hear there is a neat little website out there that can get you all sorts of useful information.
RAID is a perfectly reasonable backup solution from a hardware point of view. It protects you from drive failure, gives you quick access, and is currently the best bang for your buck if you have non-negligible amounts of data to back up.
Of course if all you do is overwrite a single snapshot every night, all that protects you from is drive failure on the main machine, but that is a software issue. There are plenty of bone-headed ways to back up to tape as well, and as has been established, optical is far from reliable when it comes to long-term storage.
And a $2000 TV that could display them.
And the system might even get declassified after a few decades!
I'd be more worried about homonyms, especially ones that are used in the similar contexts. I wonder if it will be able to handle sentences like "I turn left here, right?", which manage to confuse even humans at times.
The Mac ones are just particularly loud and visible.
Now, a case can be made for giving the original creators control over the rights to buy, sell, lease, or otherwise make a profit from the information in order to provide a financial motive for creating useful information. Governments have been regulating commerce for as long as there have been governments, so there's nothing peculiar about that. If *AA wants to go after the guys selling bootleg DVDs on street corners, more power to them.
However, the establishment of the concept of intellectual property creates fertile ground for an assault on the free exchange of information, which is liable to cause far greater harm to society than any benefit derived from the financial incentive to produce new information.
Nothing breeds greater contempt for the rule of law than punishment without crime and crime without punishment.
Now that you mention it, the fine art of theater could use a revival.
This can number into hundreds or thousands of users, with the number constantly changing as people finish their downloads. And if one or more of those seeds happens to be in a foreign country, it may take months or be outright impossible to shut the torrent down.
The discovery was the fact that these animals were a previously uncatalogued species belonging to a previously uncatalogued family, not the fact that these animals existed.
I think it's about time to stop arguing a no longer relevant point and go back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing and Soviet Russia jokes.
I'll start: in Soviet Russia dead horse beats you!
And no, that was not a hidden assumption, that was an indication of purpose. Too much of our current policy is made by charlatans and for idiots. I believe that the format of discussion should be manipulated in such a way as to minimize the impact of rhetoric, demagoguery, and other attempts at emotional manipulation. Policy should be implemented because it makes sense, not because of the personalities pushing it.
And if you do manage to find them, you can never tell where they'll be the next moment.
I think it is safe to assume that those whom the law helps (or whom it doesn't harm) will advocate for it, and those whom it hurts will advocate against it, and that truth will come out of the discussion if the discussion stays rational for the duration.
Personally, I prefer living in a society where everything that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted, but maybe that's just me.