hypocrisy: insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have.
If I'm opposed to you pointing a gun at your foot and pulling the trigger would it be hypocritical of me to suggest that you go to the hospital after having done so--or (for a more accurate analogue) that you not point your gun at your other foot until we've at least put a bandage on the hole in your foot?
As the situation changes, the solution changes. This is not hypocrisy.
Now is Michael Moore a hypocrite? Google returns 17,000 results that seem to think so (that's even more than George Bush!). Of course, I have yet to see a good example of his hypocrisy (and yes, I'm too cheap to buy the book).
Hypocrisy is where you profess beliefs, claiming to enforce them on everyone (including yourself), that contradict your own actions. It's a one rule for all--but don't look at the man behind the curtain--sort of thing.
During my searches I uncovered a site that questions the significance of hypocrisy and explains hypocrisy far better than I can. But, whatever, feel free to form your own opinion.
Have you checked for a hidden registry key for this?
I know in a previous discussion someone mentioned a fix for typing web addresses into the file manager (for http and ftp protocols) to cause it to open Mozilla instead of IE, by changing 2 registry keys.
I don't know if the MSN thing is related (if it just passes the web address off to the shell then this should fix it).
Disclaimer: I have not tried this, I do not run windows, but it kind of makes a Microsoft-y sort of sense and might solve your problems.
Yeah but if the expert has done the exact same things the exact same way for 'y' years, how experienced is he really?
Not much more than the guy who has done all of those things exactly once.
Experience doesn't come with time on a job.
Experience is about broadening your horizons and trying different things.
What the grandparent was implying is that being an expert isn't about having done 1 thing for 'y' years: it's about having a broad experience in the field and being able to deal with various contingencies that crop up.
By its very nature, "configuring" doesn't require the kind of skills that promote expertise. There's no design or understanding involved, you just set things in a way that makes things work...Yay... In short configuring is a task for a (small) shell script. (You've wasted your life). j/k.
In addition, Windows has changed significantly since 3.11, so how much of that experience would be valid today?
Also (responding to great grandparent), how is setting
Are you sure? I would have thought most programs would run just fine...Isn't that the point behind having a standard C library and POSIX standards? Most of the specific kernel stuff is supposed to be wrapped by the C library (and other system libraries), so all the linux/BSD specific stuff is linked at run time. And [my understanding is that] since the ABI is set by the processor manufacturer, the same ABI would be used for both, meaning it should work. With the exception of a [rare] few extra/different calls in glibc is there really that much of a difference in the environment to a program? (I'm not familiar enough with the two kernels to know) The only programs that shouldn't work between them should be ones that make direct system calls or do something linux-specific (like valgrind).
Yes, you can't expect to simply replace the kernel and reboot. But you should be able to replace the OS (which includes the system-dependent libraries and configuration files), and reboot. [If it's not like this...it *should* be....] And then you can run your choice of theme-ing engine, wm, and XFree86 you want. On windows it's all or nothing. Even if you wanted to run microsoft's wm on BSD you couldn't (even if you were willing to recompile the entire system to do so, you can't!).
The original's poster's point was that it can be done. The fact that it may or may not difficult isn't really relevant. Especially since the moment GNU/BSD becomes fashionable there'll be a million shell scripts to do it for you automagically -- these are computers, they're good at handling complex and tedious problems (provided it's the same problem every time).
1. The losses over the phone line don't really count since we're A->D'ing it again (odds are against a distortion significant enough to alter the file), and then performing error-correction (most modems do this). Because of this, the web pages you look at don't look messed up and the Linux iso's you download all match the md5. Media file transfers aren't any different.
2. If 2 files of the same recording are available, and are the same size, which sounds better, an mp3 or a wav? You aren't going to say that the optimized-for-sound analog-in and speaker out on you sound card are crappy enough to make that much of a difference?
Disney is in the process of donating all seven patents associated with the new air launch technology to a non-profit organization so these patents can be
licensed to other pyrotechnic providers
Note that this *doesn't* mean that anyone can use them for free. This means that for a "processing fee" you can get their permission to use the technology.
Nonprofit != public domain.
Just because they dontated them to a nonprofit organization doesn't mean that it'll be free.
So politics doesn't matter? I could understand if they were talking the latest episode of Dawson's creak (or whatever's popular now), but politics (well *real* politics, as opposed to that populistic fluff that seems to pass for politics these days) is an innately nerdy. You ever thought that maybe the 'politics nerds' might want to talk about a few things that matter to them. You don't have to watch.
That's right! Ship the bastards away! How dare those sonsofdoggies take *our* jobs [even if the jobs aren't technically ours or America's, but just belong to the corporation to do with as they please].
Damn those CEO's [who by pursuing their own "american dream"] have the gall to hire qualified, efficient labor from another country when they could choose from the Ahmer_ican semi-illiterate masses.
[To hell with "the best man for the job!"] Companies should focus on finding the best Ahmer_ican for the job.
[To hell with capitalism and the free market] What we need is an Ahmer_ican gubment that will force those cooperations to do what's right.
[Forget the "give us your poor, your hungry, your downtrodden". Forget that "the american dream" applies to immigrants as well as residents. Forget that you do not have a *right* to have a job.] Those foreign maggot spawn gots no rights to take mai jobs (I'm an Ahmer_ican guddammit) [Forget that the very basis of the constitution is that *all* (men/people) are born with certain rights, and that includes those very foreigners who come to the US seeking opportunity (as your ancestors once came to america seeking opporunity). ] [Forget that many who come seeking jobs may eventually immigrate to the US permanently, meaning that then these americans will dare to take our american jobs. (This would also act as a "brain-drain" on other companies, insuring the US economic superiority)]
The main thing would be that the server you are connecting to is specific for the file you're downloading, so the extra overhead of searching the server and sorting through irrelevant items is avoided. This also makes bittorrent seem more legitimate.
There are also probably some differences with the hashes and selection of which piece to download next. I think eDonkey uses one hash for the entire file (I'm not sure if I'm correct about this), whereas bittorrent uses a hash for each segment. This would mean that bittorrent has better error checking capabilities and could discard corruption sooner. Also, I don't think eDonkey uses a rarest first algorithm (though some clients could implement it).
Actually, slashdot just sensationalizes the news like every other media outlet.
Stories saying someone is suing someone else usually just mean that they threatened to (check the archives and you'll notice this trend). So it's just a matter of fairness that Microsoft isn't treated any differently...
I'll admit there is a bias, but the bias is more anti-corporate here than anti-Microsoft. Microsoft is just a popular pinup for "Evil Corporation".
"Hahaha. Thanks for the laugh. And by the way, what makes you think professional translators can't be fans?"
I never said professional translators can't be fans, just that they usually aren't. And even if they are fans, most of the time its more of a shallow "Hey this is cool fanship" which causes the deeper elements in the works to be lost in translation. When fans translate something it's because it means something to them. When professionals translate something, they usually have other motives (possibly in addition to fanship) which color their translations.
"Where did I bring the law into it?"
Well, where in your personal morality does it tell you that you are allowed to dictate what other people can and can't do? Restricting the freedoms of people is the sole realm of law. Accusing other people of "lacking" (?!?) personal morality won't change that.
Short Rant about the "lacking" statement: I don't quite see how people can be lacking in personal morality. Personal morality is just the basis an individual uses to decide right and wrong. An individual lacking morality would neither be able to classify something as right or as wrong, and hence can do nothing. In the cases in question they merely to no share certain aspects of your morality. So you should just call them BJH-morality deficient. Every person has a different morality. Just being different doesn't make it nonexistent.
Also: Why are you so insulting in your comments/troll? Are you really so insecure in your own viewpoint that you need to push others down to make your own opinions more credible?
I read it, but it doesn't seem to have much bearing on religion.
The article parent linked was about "Cargo Cult Science". The gist of it was that a lot of crackpot ideas are based on the the failure to use a scientific method. Feynaman suggested that the growing phenomenon of searching only for new results and not using proper control experiments for reference along with the failure of many scientists to publish experiments which failed to prove their theories is resulting in junk science which is practically worthless.
I don't really see what this has to do with religion. All the things he talks about assume a scientifically provable phenomenon is being tested. Last I checked religion, metaphysics, deity, and the irrational can't be tested by through scientific method.
2. Maybe god doesn't actively interfere with human affairs. It might be a free will thing or a "I just want to sit back and watch" thing (reference deists).
3. Maybe the *christian* god doesn't exist. There are *many* religions and many types of deities. It's one thing to say a god of christian conception doesn't exist, but another to say that no god exists. Search around and maybe you'll find a religion that suits your beliefs. Not every religion is like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Some are quite radically different.
For instance William Blake seemed to believe that the imagination and creative impulses *were* god and through them you could see the "infinite" (or some such...I don't quite get it).
Anyway, there are tons of books written all throughout history about religion, many of them repeating that same argument. If you wanted you could research all of those and then decide for yourself what you want to believe.
Information does "want" to be free. Well, at least in the same way that "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights". It can be shown that societies in which information is free are more innovative, productive, and happier.
That said, this isn't information (as I'm defining it for this argument), it's entertainment.
I'll agree that comparision to open source is rather inaccurate and fanboyish, but your pointed rant against the quality of these scanslations is out of line.
The scanslations I read are actually really good quality. I especially like literal translations with notes providing context/explanation at the bottom (I don't see this in comercial offerings). Good scanslations even go so far as to translate sound effects and street signs, explain puns, and even provide information on a particular card game that the characters are playing (and since part of the reason I read it is for the foreign culture aspect this is good).
A lot of the scanslations I've read have actually been more accurate than the licensed translations that come out later. The licensed versions usually are toned down, toned up, "refocused to fit the audience", or just plain mistranslated (this is especially common since "professional" translators miss a lot of the puns that require an in-depth understanding of the series that only a real fan has)
I have a lot of respect for these people. They put a lot of effort into what they do, and do it as a hobby. If you don't like what they're doing, then post *why* you don't like it instead of going ad hominem
You say in a later post that the reason you posted such drivel is that you "have a legitimate beef with people that think that because they can do something, they should be allowed to do it?". The only thing wrong that they're doing is unlicensed redistribution. Since most groups also stop distributing their scanslations after the manga has been licensed for release in the US, the harm is minimal (if not negative).
Also where's freedom in your "people shouldn't think that because they can do something, they should be allowed to do it"? Doesn't freedom mean you can do anything you want? Law can only place a few, specific, reasonable limitations on freedom before it transforms freedom into something not free.
A world where people have to ask permission before exercising their "freedoms" isn't free.
Scanslations and fan-subs are currently in a legal gray area. It aspects that could be considered illegal (although significantly less so than kazzaa). Until the people decides whether this patch of land is white or black you don't have any [legal] right to judge scanslators or fan-subbers.
Also what have you done? Have you worked on large difficult projects in your own spare time and then released them for free (or do you just spend all day [from 10:00am to 2:00am] on slashdot)?
And how do you spend *your* time? How do you dare to spend your time that way just because you can -- whose permission did *you* get?
Don't forget that binary x86 instructions are also bytecodes. This means that you could get the benefits of dynamic recompilation by running an X86VM on your x86 machine and could program in any language you want. In fact modern x86 processors already do something like this in hardware as they translate opcodes into micro-ops.
Though it does seem rather odd for the "future" of programming to be writing code to feed to an optimizor/translator which feeds code to an optimized translator which feeds code to the real processor.
Actually Telcos are really trying to get into the TV market to compete with cable.
When I was co-oping this past spring, an engineer (from sales) gave a presentation to us co-ops about this issue (the company sells DSLAMs). The main problem is bandwidth. Even with ADSL2 and VDSL using mpeg4 compression you're limited to 1 or two simultaneous HDTV channels, and even then you have to be close to a CO in order to get that. Most people who are used to cable would balk at only being able to watch 1 channel at a time (otherwise everyone would be using satellite). So in order to provide a competing product, they need more bandwidth.
In a couple years I'll bet we'll start to see Telcos offering this service, and cable TV will start to get really cheap (or networks will start gouging more </pessimist>).
To address your other point, I think we should take DNA samples at birth. That would level the playing field, so previous arrests don't tip the scales at all. This may just be a gradual shift in that direction.
I don't like what that does to the presumption of innocence (which is required by freedom).
How can a man be truely free if he has to always insure he has an alibi to protect himself against false accusations? This is the reason for the presumption of innocence. [insert overused "Atlas Shrugged" reference]
It doesn't make sense to gather evidence against the innocent, unless you're assuming they're guilty.
Evidence should be tied to a crime. Evidence shouldn't sit in some freezer or file cabinet somewhere waiting for a crime to happen.
I probably don't have sufficient background to argue the DNA matching either (since the only information I have on it comes from the Discovery Channel, and High School Biology.) [Though I do remember the gene sequencing lab my class did where we used restriction enzymes to cut the DNA of a common bacterium into pieces (the enzymes cut places in the DNA that match certain patterns [the enzyme we used cut along a pattern of 4 bases -- ATTA, I think]), and then used gel-electrophoresis to pull the pieces through the gel. You can then tell the relative size of these pieces by how far it moved. (This isn't even as informative as it sounds because you still don't know what order the different pieces would be on the original DNA) If you do this enough, and use a large enough variety of different enzymes you could theoretically determine the sequence of the DNA.] And since the pages of results shown on the crime investigation shows looked a lot like the gel-electrophoresis results I did in High School, I fear they may use the same method. [In the high school experiment the results were *very* difficult to interpret (read open to subjective interpretation) as fragments that are nearly on top of eachother were indistinguishable from a single fragment. And fragments generally formed streaks, so it is difficult to decide where to measure.]
Of course now that I think about it, my analysis in the previous post was rather off. The math assumed they picked specific points on the DNA and used those bases as markers. If they're still using gel-electrophoresis and restriction enzymes for sequencing, the markers are probably patterns that the restriction enzymes match, which would give them multiple points of comparison for each marker. This sounds good, but a single small mutation (ie base replacement) could drastically alter the results of 2 points on for up to 2 markers, making the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent. Another problem is that you can have identical results for completely different DNA -- all that is required is that the two samples have the same spacings between patterns (and they need not be in the same order). As for statistical probability in using this method, it is heavily dependent on the enzymes used, and the distribution of sequences in the human populations and other factors I know nothing about [so sorry, no math for you].
If we were comparing DNA to DNA, then you'd be right. If we compare the entire sequence base-pair by base-pair for each of the chromosomes for a near-exact match (since the sampled cells could simply have small mutations from the original), then we'd have a near perfect form of identification (excluding identical twins and near-impossibilities).
The problem is that we don't currently sequence the entire DNA sample for legal proceedings. They have sets of markers that they look for and only compare at these markers. They then depend on the low probability of anyone sharing those combinations of markers. I don't know for certain how many markers they use, but I can almost guarrantee that it's not enough.
If you assume the combinations of these markers are uniquely distributed, you'd need 15.5 of them to identify an individual in 2^31 (a little over 2 billion). If you make the *significantly* more realistic assumption that the distribution is gaussian, then you would need either (a) infinitely many markers for a perfect match or (b) to pick a reasonable error rate and place it on the unknown, final, gaussian curve (knowing that the error rate will be higher towards the center), and increasingly more difficult equations (as your estimation of the number of markers increases) until you obtain a distribution that satisfies the rate you chose (I would like to do this calculation myself, but it would be a lot of trouble for this simple post -- sorry).
This means that Mr, Previously Accused is more likely to to be suspect (since the DNA was a close match) for crimes he had nothing to do with, just *because* a match showed up in the Police's DNA database. Should it really be the responsibility of a former suspected felon to have an alibi ready for every moment of their life?
This ruins the assumption of innocence of all people previously suspected of a felony, and puts felons on an unequal ground in the eyes of the law. If felons really have "paid their debt to society", then why are we still holding it against them? If these suspects really didn't do it, then why are we still suspicious of them?
I'll put my crudely coded Javascript quicksort algorithm against your finely honed 100% assembly bubblesort algorithm any day.
Sure! I happen to have 8 millon lists, each containing 2 elements. Let's see who can sort them the fastest.
Don't forget that the purported speed to these algorithms only really comes into play if the "problem size" is large. For practical problems you must take the average problem size into account when choosing your algorithm. There is no one-size-fits-all algorithm for anything (and that's why they still teach them..).
What the article was saying this this:
Writing in assembly language forces you to think about your problem. In order to write a solution in assembly language you almost have to have a god-like understanding of the problem. If you take this approach of near-god-like understanding of a problem and use it for higher language programming you end up getting much faster code much sooner with fewer bugs.
There's nothing wrong with higher level languages in their place, but often times people use the ease of writing in these languages to write some quick solution with little thought behind it, and hope to test the bugs out of it.
Myself, I don't agree with the article. I think that it's just that now that programming has become easy, a lot more people are doing it that wouldn't have bothered to take the effort necessary to program when it was hard. This means that you have more people that have lower expectations of required effort to do a certain job. Is it that suprising that the amount of effort expended by those involved is shows a correlation with the amount of effort they expect is required? But that's just my 010b cents....
I use linux because it's lighter (which is why I like Gentoo-- it can be as light as I want it to be).
I run minimal services, XFree86 and enlightenment (and even then enlightenment is a little heavier than I want...). I run most of my programs (with the exception of firefox and xterm) from terminals (or xterms).
Transparent windows with variable alpha and animated menus is nice and pretty, but I don't use my computer to sit and watch it do pretty things while I'm trying to do something. My time is too important to me to spend it watching a talking dog or dancing paper-clip, or waiting for the "smooth scrolling" to jerkily scroll down when I scroll my middle mouse button (as opposed to the preferable "teleport" method).
When I use Windows the first thing I do is turn all the animations and "features" off, so I don't have to wait around for them. Though it still irks me when I have to wait 15s after clicking the "Start" button for the menu to be swapped off of disk. Or wait 10s after right clicking on an icon for the menu to do the drop-down animation so I can continue what I was trying to do.
It's getting to where I can't find a functional minimal setup that runs on a 133 MHz pentium with 32 MB RAM (which I'd love to have because it would *blaze* on my 1.1GHz system with 512 MB RAM, and could also be run on my parents POS system [which is currently struggling with Win98SE and IE 6]).
The point of me having a fast computer is not to display pretty menus, and have extra "features". It's so I can do what I want/need to do faster.
Slashdot Mirror
hypocrisy: insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have.
If I'm opposed to you pointing a gun at your foot and pulling the trigger would it be hypocritical of me to suggest that you go to the hospital after having done so--or (for a more accurate analogue) that you not point your gun at your other foot until we've at least put a bandage on the hole in your foot?
As the situation changes, the solution changes. This is not hypocrisy.
Now is Michael Moore a hypocrite? Google returns 17,000 results that seem to think so (that's even more than George Bush!). Of course, I have yet to see a good example of his hypocrisy (and yes, I'm too cheap to buy the book).
Hypocrisy is where you profess beliefs, claiming to enforce them on everyone (including yourself), that contradict your own actions. It's a one rule for all--but don't look at the man behind the curtain--sort of thing.
During my searches I uncovered a site that questions the significance of hypocrisy and explains hypocrisy far better than I can. But, whatever, feel free to form your own opinion.
Have you checked for a hidden registry key for this?
I know in a previous discussion someone mentioned a fix for typing web addresses into the file manager (for http and ftp protocols) to cause it to open Mozilla instead of IE, by changing 2 registry keys.
I don't know if the MSN thing is related (if it just passes the web address off to the shell then this should fix it).
Disclaimer: I have not tried this, I do not run windows, but it kind of makes a Microsoft-y sort of sense and might solve your problems.
Anyway here's the post I was talking about
Not much more than the guy who has done all of those things exactly once.
Experience doesn't come with time on a job.
Experience is about broadening your horizons and trying different things.
What the grandparent was implying is that being an expert isn't about having done 1 thing for 'y' years: it's about having a broad experience in the field and being able to deal with various contingencies that crop up.
By its very nature, "configuring" doesn't require the kind of skills that promote expertise. There's no design or understanding involved, you just set things in a way that makes things work...Yay... In short configuring is a task for a (small) shell script. (You've wasted your life). j/k.
In addition, Windows has changed significantly since 3.11, so how much of that experience would be valid today?
Also (responding to great grandparent), how is setting
to 0x400 an "easy" step in configuring a window's machine?
Is it easy just because you don't have to use the command line?
Are you sure? I would have thought most programs would run just fine...Isn't that the point behind having a standard C library and POSIX standards?
Most of the specific kernel stuff is supposed to be wrapped by the C library (and other system libraries), so all the linux/BSD specific stuff is linked at run time.
And [my understanding is that] since the ABI is set by the processor manufacturer, the same ABI would be used for both, meaning it should work.
With the exception of a [rare] few extra/different calls in glibc is there really that much of a difference in the environment to a program? (I'm not familiar enough with the two kernels to know)
The only programs that shouldn't work between them should be ones that make direct system calls or do something linux-specific (like valgrind).
Yes, you can't expect to simply replace the kernel and reboot. But you should be able to replace the OS (which includes the system-dependent libraries and configuration files), and reboot. [If it's not like this...it *should* be....]
And then you can run your choice of theme-ing engine, wm, and XFree86 you want.
On windows it's all or nothing. Even if you wanted to run microsoft's wm on BSD you couldn't (even if you were willing to recompile the entire system to do so, you can't!).
The original's poster's point was that it can be done. The fact that it may or may not difficult isn't really relevant. Especially since the moment GNU/BSD becomes fashionable there'll be a million shell scripts to do it for you automagically -- these are computers, they're good at handling complex and tedious problems (provided it's the same problem every time).
1. The losses over the phone line don't really count since we're A->D'ing it again (odds are against a distortion significant enough to alter the file), and then performing error-correction (most modems do this). Because of this, the web pages you look at don't look messed up and the Linux iso's you download all match the md5. Media file transfers aren't any different.
2. If 2 files of the same recording are available, and are the same size, which sounds better, an mp3 or a wav?
You aren't going to say that the optimized-for-sound analog-in and speaker out on you sound card are crappy enough to make that much of a difference?
You're right! We'll have to do something about that: this calls for a shell script!There, everybody run that for a few hours(months?!?) and Java will have finally caught up with the rest of us.
Oh, and Please use fewer 'junk' characters. =P
Note that this *doesn't* mean that anyone can use them for free. This means that for a "processing fee" you can get their permission to use the technology.
Nonprofit != public domain.
Just because they dontated them to a nonprofit organization doesn't mean that it'll be free.
So politics doesn't matter?
I could understand if they were talking the latest episode of Dawson's creak (or whatever's popular now), but politics (well *real* politics, as opposed to that populistic fluff that seems to pass for politics these days) is an innately nerdy.
You ever thought that maybe the 'politics nerds' might want to talk about a few things that matter to them. You don't have to watch.
That's right! Ship the bastards away! How dare those sonsofdoggies take *our* jobs [even if the jobs aren't technically ours or America's, but just belong to the corporation to do with as they please].
Damn those CEO's [who by pursuing their own "american dream"] have the gall to hire qualified, efficient labor from another country when they could choose from the Ahmer_ican semi-illiterate masses.
[To hell with "the best man for the job!"] Companies should focus on finding the best Ahmer_ican for the job.
[To hell with capitalism and the free market] What we need is an Ahmer_ican gubment that will force those cooperations to do what's right.
[Forget the "give us your poor, your hungry, your downtrodden". Forget that "the american dream" applies to immigrants as well as residents. Forget that you do not have a *right* to have a job.]
Those foreign maggot spawn gots no rights to take mai jobs (I'm an Ahmer_ican guddammit)
[Forget that the very basis of the constitution is that *all* (men/people) are born with certain rights, and that includes those very foreigners who come to the US seeking opportunity (as your ancestors once came to america seeking opporunity). ] [Forget that many who come seeking jobs may eventually immigrate to the US permanently, meaning that then these americans will dare to take our american jobs. (This would also act as a "brain-drain" on other companies, insuring the US economic superiority)]
*sigh* and here I was going for a (-1) Funny....
If you're hoping they'll convert newtons to pounds for you you're out of luck.
But they might be able to give you a league for your foot.
The main thing would be that the server you are connecting to is specific for the file you're downloading, so the extra overhead of searching the server and sorting through irrelevant items is avoided. This also makes bittorrent seem more legitimate.
There are also probably some differences with the hashes and selection of which piece to download next. I think eDonkey uses one hash for the entire file (I'm not sure if I'm correct about this), whereas bittorrent uses a hash for each segment. This would mean that bittorrent has better error checking capabilities and could discard corruption sooner. Also, I don't think eDonkey uses a rarest first algorithm (though some clients could implement it).
Actually, slashdot just sensationalizes the news like every other media outlet.
Stories saying someone is suing someone else usually just mean that they threatened to (check the archives and you'll notice this trend). So it's just a matter of fairness that Microsoft isn't treated any differently...
I'll admit there is a bias, but the bias is more anti-corporate here than anti-Microsoft. Microsoft is just a popular pinup for "Evil Corporation".
"Hahaha. Thanks for the laugh. And by the way, what makes you think professional translators can't be fans?"
I never said professional translators can't be fans, just that they usually aren't. And even if they are fans, most of the time its more of a shallow "Hey this is cool fanship" which causes the deeper elements in the works to be lost in translation. When fans translate something it's because it means something to them. When professionals translate something, they usually have other motives (possibly in addition to fanship) which color their translations.
"Where did I bring the law into it?"
Well, where in your personal morality does it tell you that you are allowed to dictate what other people can and can't do? Restricting the freedoms of people is the sole realm of law. Accusing other people of "lacking" (?!?) personal morality won't change that.
Short Rant about the "lacking" statement:
I don't quite see how people can be lacking in personal morality. Personal morality is just the basis an individual uses to decide right and wrong. An individual lacking morality would neither be able to classify something as right or as wrong, and hence can do nothing.
In the cases in question they merely to no share certain aspects of your morality. So you should just call them BJH-morality deficient.
Every person has a different morality. Just being different doesn't make it nonexistent.
Also:
Why are you so insulting in your comments/troll? Are you really so insecure in your own viewpoint that you need to push others down to make your own opinions more credible?
They're waiting for Ken Brown's book to come out..
I read it, but it doesn't seem to have much bearing on religion.
The article parent linked was about "Cargo Cult Science". The gist of it was that a lot of crackpot ideas are based on the the failure to use a scientific method. Feynaman suggested that the growing phenomenon of searching only for new results and not using proper control experiments for reference along with the failure of many scientists to publish experiments which failed to prove their theories is resulting in junk science which is practically worthless.
I don't really see what this has to do with religion. All the things he talks about assume a scientifically provable phenomenon is being tested. Last I checked religion, metaphysics, deity, and the irrational can't be tested by through scientific method.
Possibilities:
1. Maybe god does and you just aren't listening.
2. Maybe god doesn't actively interfere with human affairs. It might be a free will thing or a "I just want to sit back and watch" thing (reference deists).
3. Maybe the *christian* god doesn't exist. There are *many* religions and many types of deities. It's one thing to say a god of christian conception doesn't exist, but another to say that no god exists. Search around and maybe you'll find a religion that suits your beliefs. Not every religion is like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Some are quite radically different.
For instance William Blake seemed to believe that the imagination and creative impulses *were* god and through them you could see the "infinite" (or some such...I don't quite get it).
Anyway, there are tons of books written all throughout history about religion, many of them repeating that same argument. If you wanted you could research all of those and then decide for yourself what you want to believe.
Information does "want" to be free. Well, at least in the same way that "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights".
It can be shown that societies in which information is free are more innovative, productive, and happier.
That said, this isn't information (as I'm defining it for this argument), it's entertainment.
I'll agree that comparision to open source is rather inaccurate and fanboyish, but your pointed rant against the quality of these scanslations is out of line.
The scanslations I read are actually really good quality. I especially like literal translations with notes providing context/explanation at the bottom (I don't see this in comercial offerings). Good scanslations even go so far as to translate sound effects and street signs, explain puns, and even provide information on a particular card game that the characters are playing (and since part of the reason I read it is for the foreign culture aspect this is good).
A lot of the scanslations I've read have actually been more accurate than the licensed translations that come out later. The licensed versions usually are toned down, toned up, "refocused to fit the audience", or just plain mistranslated (this is especially common since "professional" translators miss a lot of the puns that require an in-depth understanding of the series that only a real fan has)
I have a lot of respect for these people. They put a lot of effort into what they do, and do it as a hobby. If you don't like what they're doing, then post *why* you don't like it instead of going ad hominem
You say in a later post that the reason you posted such drivel is that you "have a legitimate beef with people that think that because they can do something, they should be allowed to do it?".
The only thing wrong that they're doing is unlicensed redistribution. Since most groups also stop distributing their scanslations after the manga has been licensed for release in the US, the harm is minimal (if not negative).
Also where's freedom in your "people shouldn't think that because they can do something, they should be allowed to do it"?
Doesn't freedom mean you can do anything you want? Law can only place a few, specific, reasonable limitations on freedom before it transforms freedom into something not free.
A world where people have to ask permission before exercising their "freedoms" isn't free.
Scanslations and fan-subs are currently in a legal gray area. It aspects that could be considered illegal (although significantly less so than kazzaa). Until the people decides whether this patch of land is white or black you don't have any [legal] right to judge scanslators or fan-subbers.
Also what have you done? Have you worked on large difficult projects in your own spare time and then released them for free (or do you just spend all day [from 10:00am to 2:00am] on slashdot)?
And how do you spend *your* time? How do you dare to spend your time that way just because you can -- whose permission did *you* get?
Don't forget that binary x86 instructions are also bytecodes. This means that you could get the benefits of dynamic recompilation by running an X86VM on your x86 machine and could program in any language you want. In fact modern x86 processors already do something like this in hardware as they translate opcodes into micro-ops.
Though it does seem rather odd for the "future" of programming to be writing code to feed to an optimizor/translator which feeds code to an optimized translator which feeds code to the real processor.
Actually Telcos are really trying to get into the TV market to compete with cable.
When I was co-oping this past spring, an engineer (from sales) gave a presentation to us co-ops about this issue (the company sells DSLAMs). The main problem is bandwidth. Even with ADSL2 and VDSL using mpeg4 compression you're limited to 1 or two simultaneous HDTV channels, and even then you have to be close to a CO in order to get that. Most people who are used to cable would balk at only being able to watch 1 channel at a time (otherwise everyone would be using satellite). So in order to provide a competing product, they need more bandwidth.
In a couple years I'll bet we'll start to see Telcos offering this service, and cable TV will start to get really cheap (or networks will start gouging more </pessimist>).
I don't like what that does to the presumption of innocence (which is required by freedom).
How can a man be truely free if he has to always insure he has an alibi to protect himself against false accusations? This is the reason for the presumption of innocence. [insert overused "Atlas Shrugged" reference]
It doesn't make sense to gather evidence against the innocent, unless you're assuming they're guilty.
Evidence should be tied to a crime. Evidence shouldn't sit in some freezer or file cabinet somewhere waiting for a crime to happen.
I probably don't have sufficient background to argue the DNA matching either (since the only information I have on it comes from the Discovery Channel, and High School Biology.)
[Though I do remember the gene sequencing lab my class did where we used restriction enzymes to cut the DNA of a common bacterium into pieces (the enzymes cut places in the DNA that match certain patterns [the enzyme we used cut along a pattern of 4 bases -- ATTA, I think]), and then used gel-electrophoresis to pull the pieces through the gel. You can then tell the relative size of these pieces by how far it moved. (This isn't even as informative as it sounds because you still don't know what order the different pieces would be on the original DNA) If you do this enough, and use a large enough variety of different enzymes you could theoretically determine the sequence of the DNA.]
And since the pages of results shown on the crime investigation shows looked a lot like the gel-electrophoresis results I did in High School, I fear they may use the same method.
[In the high school experiment the results were *very* difficult to interpret (read open to subjective interpretation) as fragments that are nearly on top of eachother were indistinguishable from a single fragment. And fragments generally formed streaks, so it is difficult to decide where to measure.]
Of course now that I think about it, my analysis in the previous post was rather off. The math assumed they picked specific points on the DNA and used those bases as markers. If they're still using gel-electrophoresis and restriction enzymes for sequencing, the markers are probably patterns that the restriction enzymes match, which would give them multiple points of comparison for each marker. This sounds good, but a single small mutation (ie base replacement) could drastically alter the results of 2 points on for up to 2 markers, making the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent. Another problem is that you can have identical results for completely different DNA -- all that is required is that the two samples have the same spacings between patterns (and they need not be in the same order). As for statistical probability in using this method, it is heavily dependent on the enzymes used, and the distribution of sequences in the human populations and other factors I know nothing about [so sorry, no math for you].
If we were comparing DNA to DNA, then you'd be right. If we compare the entire sequence base-pair by base-pair for each of the chromosomes for a near-exact match (since the sampled cells could simply have small mutations from the original), then we'd have a near perfect form of identification (excluding identical twins and near-impossibilities).
The problem is that we don't currently sequence the entire DNA sample for legal proceedings. They have sets of markers that they look for and only compare at these markers. They then depend on the low probability of anyone sharing those combinations of markers. I don't know for certain how many markers they use, but I can almost guarrantee that it's not enough.
If you assume the combinations of these markers are uniquely distributed, you'd need 15.5 of them to identify an individual in 2^31 (a little over 2 billion). If you make the *significantly* more realistic assumption that the distribution is gaussian, then you would need either (a) infinitely many markers for a perfect match or (b) to pick a reasonable error rate and place it on the unknown, final, gaussian curve (knowing that the error rate will be higher towards the center), and increasingly more difficult equations (as your estimation of the number of markers increases) until you obtain a distribution that satisfies the rate you chose (I would like to do this calculation myself, but it would be a lot of trouble for this simple post -- sorry).
This means that Mr, Previously Accused is more likely to to be suspect (since the DNA was a close match) for crimes he had nothing to do with, just *because* a match showed up in the Police's DNA database. Should it really be the responsibility of a former suspected felon to have an alibi ready for every moment of their life?
This ruins the assumption of innocence of all people previously suspected of a felony, and puts felons on an unequal ground in the eyes of the law. If felons really have "paid their debt to society", then why are we still holding it against them? If these suspects really didn't do it, then why are we still suspicious of them?
Sure! I happen to have 8 millon lists, each containing 2 elements. Let's see who can sort them the fastest.
Don't forget that the purported speed to these algorithms only really comes into play if the "problem size" is large. For practical problems you must take the average problem size into account when choosing your algorithm. There is no one-size-fits-all algorithm for anything (and that's why they still teach them..).
What the article was saying this this:
Writing in assembly language forces you to think about your problem. In order to write a solution in assembly language you almost have to have a god-like understanding of the problem. If you take this approach of near-god-like understanding of a problem and use it for higher language programming you end up getting much faster code much sooner with fewer bugs.
There's nothing wrong with higher level languages in their place, but often times people use the ease of writing in these languages to write some quick solution with little thought behind it, and hope to test the bugs out of it.
Myself, I don't agree with the article. I think that it's just that now that programming has become easy, a lot more people are doing it that wouldn't have bothered to take the effort necessary to program when it was hard. This means that you have more people that have lower expectations of required effort to do a certain job. Is it that suprising that the amount of effort expended by those involved is shows a correlation with the amount of effort they expect is required? But that's just my 010b cents....
I use linux because it's lighter (which is why I like Gentoo-- it can be as light as I want it to be).
I run minimal services, XFree86 and enlightenment (and even then enlightenment is a little heavier than I want...). I run most of my programs (with the exception of firefox and xterm) from terminals (or xterms).
Transparent windows with variable alpha and animated menus is nice and pretty, but I don't use my computer to sit and watch it do pretty things while I'm trying to do something. My time is too important to me to spend it watching a talking dog or dancing paper-clip, or waiting for the "smooth scrolling" to jerkily scroll down when I scroll my middle mouse button (as opposed to the preferable "teleport" method).
When I use Windows the first thing I do is turn all the animations and "features" off, so I don't have to wait around for them. Though it still irks me when I have to wait 15s after clicking the "Start" button for the menu to be swapped off of disk. Or wait 10s after right clicking on an icon for the menu to do the drop-down animation so I can continue what I was trying to do.
It's getting to where I can't find a functional minimal setup that runs on a 133 MHz pentium with 32 MB RAM (which I'd love to have because it would *blaze* on my 1.1GHz system with 512 MB RAM, and could also be run on my parents POS system [which is currently struggling with Win98SE and IE 6]).
The point of me having a fast computer is not to display pretty menus, and have extra "features". It's so I can do what I want/need to do faster.