Side Note: Babelfish is aptly named, the translations are usually Babble.
Of course it's aptly named... Babble comes from Babel which comes from "the Tower of" which comes from the Biblical story in which man tries to build a tower to heaven and God gets pissed and makes it so they can't understand each other and thus couldn't finish the tower.
Though given the origin of the name "Babelfish", then it is ironic that what comes -out- is babble.:)
But it does make me wonder if perhaps the Babelfish in HHGTTG didn't actually work that well. Thanks to the fish, no one ever bothered to learn anyone else's languages, but how do they know it's an accurate translation? Maybe the fish doesn't do any better than our poor software-based fish, but the bad grammar was fixed by the character's brains/the editor. At least it's amusing to think of all the aliens communicating in babelfish-like translations.:)
The "base" of the logic is really a pointless distinction.
Maybe to you. To engineers, it isn't.
If you have a computing task you want done, it's just a matter of how to "encode" the task such that the computer can accomplish it, and how efficiently (money- and time-wise) that machine can accomplish that task.
So it's "just" a matter of engineers doing their jobs, eh? But yes, it is a matter of efficiency. Engineers care about efficiency. Engineers know that how you encode data can greatly alter the efficiency of the tasks performed on that data.
Every base is isomorphic (can be represented in) to every other base. I mean, your computer has libraries to print out integers in base 10, even though the internal representation is binary.
Yes, anything a binary computer can compute, a trinary one can and vice versa. They're both Turing machines. Anything a computer can compute, a human can, thus making the last sixty years of computing "pointless".
True and false, and even 0 and 1 are human ideas. Computers deal in voltages.
That's exactly why this matters. Binary computers deal with two voltages, and trinary computers deal with three. The actual, physical devices are different. So while in the land of theory you haven't at all changed what the computer can do, in the land of reality you've fundamentally changed the way data can be represented and the basic operations that can be performed. That isn't a small thing.
One of the first verification processes in semiconductor technologies is 'can we make memory with it'. They start off simple and let the circuits get more complex from there.
Yes, but the memory that they make is normally an SRAM, not DRAM. A plain SRAM is pretty simple, if you don't go nuts optimizing your sense amps and what have you, and uses the same process steps as all your other digital logic. DRAM, on the otherhand, is made with large vertical capacitors that require a special process. So unless you are intending to use a technology to make DRAM, you wouldn't go through the effort to try to build it.
Besides, the tech doesn't sound well-suited for low-power devices like DRAM anyway.
But it is fun decyphering and mocking his weasel-babble.:)
Heise said even if, hypothetically, some older Caldera code were open-source, it wouldn't make a difference to the case.
Nice technique there. Imply it isn't true with a nice weasel-word, but don't actually deny it. How well does that work? "If, hypothetically, the earth revolved aronud the sun..." Also funny how he says it wouldn't make a difference to the case. When all the evidence you've shown is proven to be invalid, that could only not affect the case if all your evidence (shown and unshown) is invalid. But since he already knows his case in a paper sack is worth the paper sack, he isn't lying when he says having his "evidence" publicly shredded doesn't change anything.:)
"Let's say you have a hundred files, and you put one of your hundred files under the GPL (GNU General Public License). That doesn't mean you've lost the rights to your other 99 files," Heise said.
More wonderful weaseling! What he says is precisely true. He is saying "putting one file under a certain license doesn't force you to put other files under that license also". What he's hoping you don't think about too hard is that those other 99 files could be under the GPL also.
He's also probably hoping you don't think to hard about what he's saying at all, since it basically comes down to "Just because every verifiable claim we've made has been proven to be bullshit doesn't mean we're completely full of shit!" Sure, Mike.:)
Yes, but in a better movie the hero could plausibly fail, even though you know they won't. The entertainment comes from seeing how the hero overcomes the difficulties. When your hero is Superman, though, there isn't much of a struggle. Watching Neo kick ass was like watching a lazy fat man successfully microwave a burrito. It might take a while, but you know he could do it easily whenever he wanted, so until that point he's obviously just fucking around.
I was so happy when Trinity and Morpheus finally stole the screen away from Captain Kung Fu. Even if to get that to happen Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo had to suddenly become complete morons: "Let's split up-- Neo, you engage these guys completely unecessarily, while soft, vulnerable, mortal Trinity and I will flee like mice before the magic floating invisible ghost agents." But I'll forgive that, because we get to finally see some fights with some tension. When Morpheus stands on top of a semi facing an agent and draws his sword, at least you get the impression that he's being brave. You know he isn't going to die, but you don't know that he's going to win, either.
Remember the fight between Neo and the oracle's guardian? How they exchanged blows for a few minutes, and then one of them just decided that the fight was over? Notice how every Neo fight was like that?
As they were the aggressor and had no legitimate stance in the matter, they had no right to apply "conditions". They should have never attacked in the first place. They should have given up any of the hundreds of days after. They had plenty of time to do the reasonable thing.
You are absolutely correct. But we were speaking of saving lives. Accepting their surrender would have saved two hundred thousand. If saving lives and ending the war were truly the rationales for dropping the bomb, then it seems "accept the enemy's offer to surrender" would have been a far more reasonable choice.
Deregulation would only help this sort of crisis, because it would be in the individual stake-holder's best interest to shield themselves from such an event.
Well, that's one possible outcome, but I wouldn't say only. It is also in the stake-holder's best interest to cut as many corners as possible, reducing costs and maximizing profits so they can cash in and get out before the inevitable disaster hits.
The evidence is unambiguous that the only alternative to nuclear surrender was a bloodbath the likes of which had never been seen before, and equally unambiguous that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were barely enough,
Oh please. The Japanese had already tried to surrender conditionally before we dropped the bombs. The U.S. would not accept anything but unconditional surrender. So how exactly was the bomb necessary? How did using it save lives? Here's an idea: By accepting surrender, we could have saved all the lives we saved by using the bomb and all the lives we ended by using the bomb! Best of both worlds!
Look. Japan had no navy and no airforce at this point. They were beaten. Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs all believed that both the bomb and invasion were unnecessary. They believed we could force unconditional surrender without them. It would have been even easier to just accept the offered surrender, but hey! Even the war hawks of the day don't think that.
But it sure does make it nice when we can tell kids in school that yes, we dropped the bombs, but it actually saved lives! So don't worry, all the vaporized Japanese kids are glad we did it, because now they're a Democracy like us (only not as great)!
and that in retrospect the US should have waited until it had more, larger nukes.
Ugh. Look, whatever load of history you swallowed, by your own logic what good would bigger bombs have done? Your version of Japan is the Black Knight. How is hacking off his arms and legs -more- going to convince him he's lost?
Waiting for more bombs might have been a good idea, because then we could have demonstrated them over the ocean but still had some for actual use.
The slogal "war for oil!" was made up by extremists to appeal to simpletons and for them to put on the signs that they wave.
True. Because "No Blood for Extension of American Neo-Colonial Hegemony!" was both difficult to chant and explain. Handing out annotated copies of 1984 was also prohibitive.
However, once you aim even a whiff of intellectual penetration at it, the "it is a war for oil" claims vanish in a puff of illogic.
Of course. It is just the simplest explanation once you've eliminated the also baseless "Iraq is an immediate threat" claim. Obviously the reasons for the war were much larger than just some silly oil fields. The portions of the adminstration with brains think much bigger and longer term than that. Though it may seem as though Cheney's energy plan was designed under the assumption that we'd have access to all that friendly Iraqi oil, and it could be argued this suggests oil was the motivation for war, I just figure that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made, and he was just making plans based on that knowledge. Call it a happy side effect, which I'm sure is what everyone with crude-oil-colored dollar signs in their eyes is calling it. Which just happens to be a bunch of the adminstration's friends, but I'm serious, that's really just a happy coincidence.
*cough* USA invades Iraq TWICE in 12 years *cough* Where is my cheap oil then?
I'm sorry, but I don't see your name on the list of adminstration sweethearts... Let's see... Haliburton... Lockheed... No bofkentucky!
Oh, wait... You didn't think that you -- meaning the public in general -- was going to get to benefit from the war, did you? No, no, no... Silly prole!
Forget site licenses. If SCO's logic were true, and it was not possible to grant someone permission to make copies, then you wouldn't be able to authorize a publisher to make copies of your work! So basically if you own a book by an author who retains the copyright to their book, then both you and the publisher are violating copyright law!
No... Wait... That's completely stupid, too. The whole reason we have copyright is so that the author can grant the right to copy to others, and request compensation in return. Unless we required all authors to self-publish, or transfer their copyright. Which I suppose SCO thinks is the case!
So is this Heise a moron, or does he think we all are? Does he actually not realize that copyright law prohibts only unauthorized copies, and that the GPL is a document which grants authorization? Or is he just hoping we won't realize that?
Dictionary.com defines parasite as: An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
It says nothing about differing species, only different organisms. By the above definition, a fetus is a perfect example.
No, it isn't.
Quick clue: A human fetus not only contributes to the survival of the host, it contributes to the survival of the host in the only way that ultimately matters at all. You know your DNA, which coded for the proteins that stimulated the development of tissues into the various glands that produce the hormones that make you want to shag? It's doing that on purpose, because that's the only way it will propogate itself.
Say you have two organisms A and B. Organism A feeds off of B. Sounds parasitic, right? However, organism B depends upon organism A for successfull reproduction, which is as fundamental a survival need as there is. That's called symbiosis, and is the term usually used to describe relationships such as that between flowers and bees. That's why flowers exist, and why placentas exist -- because it is in the host's advantage to have them.
The issue at hand is still whether or not a fetus counts as a human, and the answer to that isn't scientific, it's theological - which makes it good fodder for debate, but not as a basis for advancing or hindering scientific research. Just like the RIAA's supposed 'potential income', you can't quantify 'potential humanity'.
I know this is/. and we're supposed to work the RIAA into every subject somehow, but that's really a ridiculous comparison, beating out even the characterization of babies as parasites. The "potential income" is sales that didn't happen, and may not have happened, and thus is actually a description of nothing. The "potential" in "potential humanity" is that the foetus we're talking about might be a human right now. It exists, and we're here debating on whether it is human or not. And that absolutely is a reason to advance or hinder scientific research, because if it is a human, then we'd basically be allowing unethical experiments on humans against their will. Comparing that to the RIAA's "you might have bought a CD!" is both silly and sad.
It was a good hold-over until Zelda, and that's about as much credit as I'll give it. I think the game was damaged by having the Star Fox license slapped onto a game that was already under development. Originally it was going to be original, not have That God Damned Frog, and you could switch characters. Otherwise the game probably wasn't going to be any better, so it still wouldn't have been amazing.
After all, the presales were ~600,000 units, which is about half of their total sales.
The huge number of presales probably got a huge boost (or at least Nintendo should hope they did) by the Zelda: Ocarina of Time bonus disk offer. If you pre-ordered Wind Waker and plopped down $10 deposit, you got a bonus disk with Zelda: Ocarina of Time, including a version with remixed dungeons. I did this basically to get Ocarina of Time for $10, since I didn't get back to buy the new Zelda until after my preorder ticket was expired.
Anyway, I'm quite certain that this bonus disk deal drove up the pre-order sales immensely.
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
Right. Because we don't have cheap access to space. While it might not have helped the ISS, you can certainly imagine that being able to cheaply launch people and materials into orbit would make building and staffing a station much more attractive.
Space exploration is going to be a very incremental process. First we need cheap access to orbit. Then we build something in orbit that can be used as a launch point. Then, we profit.
Absurd is taking half a sentence, blowing it up into a full theory, and then shooting that theory full of holes. Is that what philosophers do, go deliberately digging for logical fallacies by enforcing literalism and requiring every sentence fragment to be a tautology?
Obviously "humans are animals that had human parents" doesn't take into account evolution. At some point our parents weren't human, but became so over time. The miracles of sexual reproduction! So strictly speaking, the statement was wrong, though there probably wasn't a time where the division between non-human parents and human offspring was clear.
Though if you restrict the meaning of his statement to non-pre-historic times, then it is correct. The human precursor is no longer around, so the only way new humans come about is from humans. Assuming you'll accept that it is extremely unlikely that another non-human species will evolve into humans, that is.
The Matrix is certainly a very fun, very cool movie, but the distopian future of self-aware machines displacing humanity just isn't reality.
Which is a damn shame.
This is me, when the machines become self-aware and decide to take over: "So, you're saying I get to live in a completely convincing fantasy world in which I can become a master of ten martial arts forms in a day and have super powers, and otherwise live my life with the same opportunities I had in the real world (only with more kung-fu), and the only cost is you get to use my now-useless physical body as a power source? Sign me up!"
Anyway, I'm not worried about robots taking jobs. Robots aren't the reason so many auto workers lost their jobs, it was because the auto industries were simultaneously retarded and greedy and had to close down tons of plants. Since robots were supposed to have replaced auto workers entirely by 1985, I'm saying humans still have a bright future laboring their way into physical disability for the forseeable future. And beyond that, I can't say, because it is unforseeable!
I think we disagree on a fundamental level about what conditions laws are enforced, and how often they're broken but not enforced. I think this problem has contributed to the number of unreasonable laws that are 'optionally enforced'.
So you want to make it easier to enforce the unreasonable laws across the board?
Sodomy laws were very difficult to enforce. The only reason the case that resulted in the SCOTUS striking down Texas' law was seen is because one of the guy's neighbors narced on them (with a false accusation), and then the police busted in and caught them.
If the neighbor had been able to view the real-time footage of the guys illegal actions, would that have been better, or worse, for his narcing?
What's more, there is a big difference between your neighbor narcing on your thoughtcrime (did you really commit it?), the government revealing they have evidence of your thought crime (do they really), and the entire society having equal access to the evidence of it, as well as evidence to their own, their neighbors, and the govenerment's thoughtcrimes - at which point it makes a lot less sense to punish you for yours.
First, you will never have equal access to the government's crimes. Even a fantasy non-corrupt 100% benevolent government would require some secrecy for national security purposes. A real life government would immediately expand that umbrella to include anything they didn't want you to see. Or rather not would, but is, as our government's assault on the FOIA shows.
Second, your neighbors aren't committing thoughtcrime. At least in their eyes. They are law-abiding citizens who would never smoke pot, sodomize another man, or speak out against the government. Now that they can prove to themselves that they are not ThoughtCriminals and you are, why exactly does it make less sense for them to persecute you for it?
It is [currently] hard to doctor realtime video and sound - especially when you don't know what is going to happen ahead of time.
But it isn't going to be real time when the footage is brought forward in a court of law, is it?
But that wasn't my point. I'm assuming that the people accused of ThoughtCrime really did commit it. The point was that you still cannot assume that you will know what the government is doing, because they will control the access to that information, and can produce whatever information they want.
Does it matter if the press releases a report indicating that the chocolate ration has increased, or if MiniTrue smudges the raw data coming out of the chocolate distributors to indicate that more chocolate is being produced and consumed?
The fact is that these heinous deviants are neither heinous nor very deviant. Facts that have only recently "come to light" as more of these folk have "come out of the closet." I think this case is in my favor, as a more transparent society has shown these laws to be rediculous pretenses for random prejudice.
Try telling that to a fundamentalist Christian. I seem to have missed when Jerry Falwell said "Oh, now that lots of homos are coming out of the closet, I realize that they aren't the godless affronts against nature I thought they were, and I'm cool with them now."
The change in the fortunes of homosexuals has nothing to do with a transparent society. It came from the same source as for minorities and women -- standing up and demanding their rights, and refusing to be silenced. Being able to peer into their lives had nothing to do with it. In fact, much like with blacks and women, standing up and making themselves known made their lives more difficult. Certainly early on and to a lesser extent even today, anyone who did "come out" was in physical danger. But I suppose the distinction between refusing to hide and allowing oneself to be spied upon is not one you'll see.
See; we do disagree. I think that a more transparent society has brought about the downfall of so
In 1984, the problem is not that the government knows what you're doing or not - it is that they are the only authority. If everyone had access to the data, they could not lie or mislead the public about what is or is not going on.
This is simply untrue. The problem was not that the government had sole access to information, it was that the government had access to that information and had the power to act upon it. Did it matter that both the government and your neighbor knew you had committed ThoughtCrime? No, you would still disappear. Remember how neighbors were encouraged to spy on and report their neighbors, and children on their parents? The government used the people as part of their spy network -- given that, how would giving your spying neighbors access to the same information as your government -help-?
And don't forget that the data can be doctored just as surely as a news reel about that data can be doctored.
The truth is that nobody cares how many condoms you buy, but if they did, they could find out (or at least the government could).
Now that we're talking about reality, you're even more wrong. There certainly are people who care how many condoms you buy. And they care about who you use those condoms with, and exactly what you do with them. How do you reconcile your transparent society with our society that until recently had places where it was illegal for a couple to have anal sex in the privacy of their own home? Take away the privacy that makes finding these heinous deviants difficult, and you make matters worse, not better.
Credit card records, receipts, video, or just going through your trash.
I have yet to hear of a forensic technique that can overcome the effects of a shredder followed by an incinerator. But if the government has to sift through the trash of 200 million Americans in order to find out who is buying excessive amounts of condoms, I can live with that.
You do live in an aquarium - though the water may be a little murky, all's that's needed for a clear view is a little effort by the owner of the tank.
In most cases, "clearing the water" is illegal In those cases where it isn't (the police, with a warrant), it should be more difficult to do so and have greater oversight.
So long as it remains difficult to spy on each individual, then the overwhelming ratio of individuals to those willing and able to make the effort to spy then we are not living in aquariums. Give complete access to everyone's lives, and you've turned "ThoughtCrime" legislation like the sodomy laws go from being statements of moral distaste to a practical enforcement scenario.
You cannot equate the ability of the police to spy on an individual and thus eliminate that individual's privacy with ubiquitous surveillance that makes spying on everyone easy and eliminates everyone's privacy. As long as the effort required to spy on an individual is not insubstantial, and more to the point must be done on an individual basis, then the notion of privacy does still exist.
The only reason you want that aquarium in a secure location is because you trust the government or you haven't considered the issue.
I don't trust the government at all, which is why I want the aquarium in a secure location. You are the one who has not considered the consequences of taking a society that very much wants to regulate what you do behind closed doors and then removing the ability to close your doors. You have not considered reality and how a transparent society would work in the real world, where live-and-let-live idealized libertarians are a tiny portion of the population, and certainly not represented in government. Transparent society could only lead to greater freedom in a perfectly tolerant utopia. It cannot bring said utopia about, and in the absence absence of utopia aids totalitarianism.
I'm actually NOT advocating putting cameras on every corner. But there
Just what basic workplace tasks does Mozilla do? Browse the web? Handle e-mail?
No. Waste time. Duh.:)
Re:Alas, it is already too late.
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The Big Kerplop
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I love the comment, "[the kids] weren't feeling good about it".
No shit.
Whatever happened to feeling good about yourself because you accomplished something, not because conditions were set up from the beginning to guarantee your success?
You know, I never felt that good after playing kickball in elementary. Then again, a lot of my peers that felt great after kickball didn't feel so good once they got their math tests back. So god damn what? Should we have eliminated the competition from the kickball games, and not actually corrected the math tests?
No, damnit. You don't eliminate the possibilty of success and failure; you find out what the kid is good at so they can feel good about that, and you help them get better at what they aren't good at so they can feel good about that, too.
Learning how to cope with failure and the idea that you aren't going to be great (or even competent) at everything you do is a crucial thing for kids to learn before they turn ten, much less enter the real world.
Oh yeah, and my friends and I would play versions of tag that allowed for you to be smarter by having strategicly placed "safe" spots, and the smartest yet slowest of us could be infuriatingly hard to catch. Are the adults too stupid to think of this kind of thing? Yes.
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Side Note: Babelfish is aptly named, the translations are usually Babble.
:)
:)
Of course it's aptly named... Babble comes from Babel which comes from "the Tower of" which comes from the Biblical story in which man tries to build a tower to heaven and God gets pissed and makes it so they can't understand each other and thus couldn't finish the tower.
Though given the origin of the name "Babelfish", then it is ironic that what comes -out- is babble.
But it does make me wonder if perhaps the Babelfish in HHGTTG didn't actually work that well. Thanks to the fish, no one ever bothered to learn anyone else's languages, but how do they know it's an accurate translation? Maybe the fish doesn't do any better than our poor software-based fish, but the bad grammar was fixed by the character's brains/the editor. At least it's amusing to think of all the aliens communicating in babelfish-like translations.
The "base" of the logic is really a pointless distinction.
Maybe to you. To engineers, it isn't.
If you have a computing task you want done, it's just a matter of how to "encode" the task such that the computer can accomplish it, and how efficiently (money- and time-wise) that machine can accomplish that task.
So it's "just" a matter of engineers doing their jobs, eh? But yes, it is a matter of efficiency. Engineers care about efficiency. Engineers know that how you encode data can greatly alter the efficiency of the tasks performed on that data.
Every base is isomorphic (can be represented in) to every other base. I mean, your computer has libraries to print out integers in base 10, even though the internal representation is binary.
Yes, anything a binary computer can compute, a trinary one can and vice versa. They're both Turing machines. Anything a computer can compute, a human can, thus making the last sixty years of computing "pointless".
True and false, and even 0 and 1 are human ideas. Computers deal in voltages.
That's exactly why this matters. Binary computers deal with two voltages, and trinary computers deal with three. The actual, physical devices are different. So while in the land of theory you haven't at all changed what the computer can do, in the land of reality you've fundamentally changed the way data can be represented and the basic operations that can be performed. That isn't a small thing.
One of the first verification processes in semiconductor technologies is 'can we make memory with it'. They start off simple and let the circuits get more complex from there.
Yes, but the memory that they make is normally an SRAM, not DRAM. A plain SRAM is pretty simple, if you don't go nuts optimizing your sense amps and what have you, and uses the same process steps as all your other digital logic. DRAM, on the otherhand, is made with large vertical capacitors that require a special process. So unless you are intending to use a technology to make DRAM, you wouldn't go through the effort to try to build it.
Besides, the tech doesn't sound well-suited for low-power devices like DRAM anyway.
But it is fun decyphering and mocking his weasel-babble. :)
:)
:)
Heise said even if, hypothetically, some older Caldera code were open-source, it wouldn't make a difference to the case.
Nice technique there. Imply it isn't true with a nice weasel-word, but don't actually deny it. How well does that work? "If, hypothetically, the earth revolved aronud the sun..." Also funny how he says it wouldn't make a difference to the case. When all the evidence you've shown is proven to be invalid, that could only not affect the case if all your evidence (shown and unshown) is invalid. But since he already knows his case in a paper sack is worth the paper sack, he isn't lying when he says having his "evidence" publicly shredded doesn't change anything.
"Let's say you have a hundred files, and you put one of your hundred files under the GPL (GNU General Public License). That doesn't mean you've lost the rights to your other 99 files," Heise said.
More wonderful weaseling! What he says is precisely true. He is saying "putting one file under a certain license doesn't force you to put other files under that license also". What he's hoping you don't think about too hard is that those other 99 files could be under the GPL also.
He's also probably hoping you don't think to hard about what he's saying at all, since it basically comes down to "Just because every verifiable claim we've made has been proven to be bullshit doesn't mean we're completely full of shit!" Sure, Mike.
Yes, but in a better movie the hero could plausibly fail, even though you know they won't. The entertainment comes from seeing how the hero overcomes the difficulties. When your hero is Superman, though, there isn't much of a struggle. Watching Neo kick ass was like watching a lazy fat man successfully microwave a burrito. It might take a while, but you know he could do it easily whenever he wanted, so until that point he's obviously just fucking around.
I was so happy when Trinity and Morpheus finally stole the screen away from Captain Kung Fu. Even if to get that to happen Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo had to suddenly become complete morons: "Let's split up-- Neo, you engage these guys completely unecessarily, while soft, vulnerable, mortal Trinity and I will flee like mice before the magic floating invisible ghost agents." But I'll forgive that, because we get to finally see some fights with some tension. When Morpheus stands on top of a semi facing an agent and draws his sword, at least you get the impression that he's being brave. You know he isn't going to die, but you don't know that he's going to win, either.
Remember the fight between Neo and the oracle's guardian? How they exchanged blows for a few minutes, and then one of them just decided that the fight was over? Notice how every Neo fight was like that?
As they were the aggressor and had no legitimate stance in the matter, they had no right to apply "conditions". They should have never attacked in the first place. They should have given up any of the hundreds of days after. They had plenty of time to do the reasonable thing.
You are absolutely correct. But we were speaking of saving lives. Accepting their surrender would have saved two hundred thousand. If saving lives and ending the war were truly the rationales for dropping the bomb, then it seems "accept the enemy's offer to surrender" would have been a far more reasonable choice.
Deregulation would only help this sort of crisis, because it would be in the individual stake-holder's best interest to shield themselves from such an event.
Well, that's one possible outcome, but I wouldn't say only. It is also in the stake-holder's best interest to cut as many corners as possible, reducing costs and maximizing profits so they can cash in and get out before the inevitable disaster hits.
The evidence is unambiguous that the only alternative to nuclear surrender was a bloodbath the likes of which had never been seen before, and equally unambiguous that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were barely enough,
Oh please. The Japanese had already tried to surrender conditionally before we dropped the bombs. The U.S. would not accept anything but unconditional surrender. So how exactly was the bomb necessary? How did using it save lives? Here's an idea: By accepting surrender, we could have saved all the lives we saved by using the bomb and all the lives we ended by using the bomb! Best of both worlds!
Look. Japan had no navy and no airforce at this point. They were beaten. Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs all believed that both the bomb and invasion were unnecessary. They believed we could force unconditional surrender without them. It would have been even easier to just accept the offered surrender, but hey! Even the war hawks of the day don't think that.
But it sure does make it nice when we can tell kids in school that yes, we dropped the bombs, but it actually saved lives! So don't worry, all the vaporized Japanese kids are glad we did it, because now they're a Democracy like us (only not as great)!
and that in retrospect the US should have waited until it had more, larger nukes.
Ugh. Look, whatever load of history you swallowed, by your own logic what good would bigger bombs have done? Your version of Japan is the Black Knight. How is hacking off his arms and legs -more- going to convince him he's lost?
Waiting for more bombs might have been a good idea, because then we could have demonstrated them over the ocean but still had some for actual use.
Not that it was necessary.
The slogal "war for oil!" was made up by extremists to appeal to simpletons and for them to put on the signs that they wave.
True. Because "No Blood for Extension of American Neo-Colonial Hegemony!" was both difficult to chant and explain. Handing out annotated copies of 1984 was also prohibitive.
However, once you aim even a whiff of intellectual penetration at it, the "it is a war for oil" claims vanish in a puff of illogic.
Of course. It is just the simplest explanation once you've eliminated the also baseless "Iraq is an immediate threat" claim. Obviously the reasons for the war were much larger than just some silly oil fields. The portions of the adminstration with brains think much bigger and longer term than that. Though it may seem as though Cheney's energy plan was designed under the assumption that we'd have access to all that friendly Iraqi oil, and it could be argued this suggests oil was the motivation for war, I just figure that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made, and he was just making plans based on that knowledge. Call it a happy side effect, which I'm sure is what everyone with crude-oil-colored dollar signs in their eyes is calling it. Which just happens to be a bunch of the adminstration's friends, but I'm serious, that's really just a happy coincidence.
*cough* USA invades Iraq TWICE in 12 years *cough*
Where is my cheap oil then?
I'm sorry, but I don't see your name on the list of adminstration sweethearts... Let's see... Haliburton... Lockheed... No bofkentucky!
Oh, wait... You didn't think that you -- meaning the public in general -- was going to get to benefit from the war, did you? No, no, no... Silly prole!
Forget site licenses. If SCO's logic were true, and it was not possible to grant someone permission to make copies, then you wouldn't be able to authorize a publisher to make copies of your work! So basically if you own a book by an author who retains the copyright to their book, then both you and the publisher are violating copyright law!
No... Wait... That's completely stupid, too. The whole reason we have copyright is so that the author can grant the right to copy to others, and request compensation in return. Unless we required all authors to self-publish, or transfer their copyright. Which I suppose SCO thinks is the case!
So is this Heise a moron, or does he think we all are? Does he actually not realize that copyright law prohibts only unauthorized copies, and that the GPL is a document which grants authorization? Or is he just hoping we won't realize that?
Either way: This is completely stupid.
Dictionary.com defines parasite as: An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
/. and we're supposed to work the RIAA into every subject somehow, but that's really a ridiculous comparison, beating out even the characterization of babies as parasites. The "potential income" is sales that didn't happen, and may not have happened, and thus is actually a description of nothing. The "potential" in "potential humanity" is that the foetus we're talking about might be a human right now. It exists, and we're here debating on whether it is human or not. And that absolutely is a reason to advance or hinder scientific research, because if it is a human, then we'd basically be allowing unethical experiments on humans against their will. Comparing that to the RIAA's "you might have bought a CD!" is both silly and sad.
It says nothing about differing species, only different organisms. By the above definition, a fetus is a perfect example.
No, it isn't.
Quick clue: A human fetus not only contributes to the survival of the host, it contributes to the survival of the host in the only way that ultimately matters at all. You know your DNA, which coded for the proteins that stimulated the development of tissues into the various glands that produce the hormones that make you want to shag? It's doing that on purpose, because that's the only way it will propogate itself.
Say you have two organisms A and B. Organism A feeds off of B. Sounds parasitic, right? However, organism B depends upon organism A for successfull reproduction, which is as fundamental a survival need as there is. That's called symbiosis, and is the term usually used to describe relationships such as that between flowers and bees. That's why flowers exist, and why placentas exist -- because it is in the host's advantage to have them.
The issue at hand is still whether or not a fetus counts as a human, and the answer to that isn't scientific, it's theological - which makes it good fodder for debate, but not as a basis for advancing or hindering scientific research. Just like the RIAA's supposed 'potential income', you can't quantify 'potential humanity'.
I know this is
Or if he was in the study to test it. Or if he was at the hospital where it was invented.
But I still think dying 5 minutes before a cure is announced is ironic.
One way or another I firmly expect they'll announce a cure for death about five minutes after they tie the tag on my toe.
;)
That'd be great! You're already in a hospital, and they've detected your condition very early!
Now if they discovered a cure for being -about- to die five minutes after they tie the tage on your toe, now that would be ironic.
Starfox Adventures
It was a good hold-over until Zelda, and that's about as much credit as I'll give it. I think the game was damaged by having the Star Fox license slapped onto a game that was already under development. Originally it was going to be original, not have That God Damned Frog, and you could switch characters. Otherwise the game probably wasn't going to be any better, so it still wouldn't have been amazing.
After all, the presales were ~600,000 units, which is about half of their total sales.
The huge number of presales probably got a huge boost (or at least Nintendo should hope they did) by the Zelda: Ocarina of Time bonus disk offer. If you pre-ordered Wind Waker and plopped down $10 deposit, you got a bonus disk with Zelda: Ocarina of Time, including a version with remixed dungeons. I did this basically to get Ocarina of Time for $10, since I didn't get back to buy the new Zelda until after my preorder ticket was expired.
Anyway, I'm quite certain that this bonus disk deal drove up the pre-order sales immensely.
No... It's a visual pun.
Or at least it works as one. I suppose it's been used by those who don't known how to pronounce "faux"...
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
Right. Because we don't have cheap access to space. While it might not have helped the ISS, you can certainly imagine that being able to cheaply launch people and materials into orbit would make building and staffing a station much more attractive.
Space exploration is going to be a very incremental process. First we need cheap access to orbit. Then we build something in orbit that can be used as a launch point. Then, we profit.
Absurd is taking half a sentence, blowing it up into a full theory, and then shooting that theory full of holes. Is that what philosophers do, go deliberately digging for logical fallacies by enforcing literalism and requiring every sentence fragment to be a tautology?
Obviously "humans are animals that had human parents" doesn't take into account evolution. At some point our parents weren't human, but became so over time. The miracles of sexual reproduction! So strictly speaking, the statement was wrong, though there probably wasn't a time where the division between non-human parents and human offspring was clear.
Though if you restrict the meaning of his statement to non-pre-historic times, then it is correct. The human precursor is no longer around, so the only way new humans come about is from humans. Assuming you'll accept that it is extremely unlikely that another non-human species will evolve into humans, that is.
The Matrix is certainly a very fun, very cool movie, but the distopian future of self-aware machines displacing humanity just isn't reality.
Which is a damn shame.
This is me, when the machines become self-aware and decide to take over: "So, you're saying I get to live in a completely convincing fantasy world in which I can become a master of ten martial arts forms in a day and have super powers, and otherwise live my life with the same opportunities I had in the real world (only with more kung-fu), and the only cost is you get to use my now-useless physical body as a power source? Sign me up!"
Anyway, I'm not worried about robots taking jobs. Robots aren't the reason so many auto workers lost their jobs, it was because the auto industries were simultaneously retarded and greedy and had to close down tons of plants. Since robots were supposed to have replaced auto workers entirely by 1985, I'm saying humans still have a bright future laboring their way into physical disability for the forseeable future. And beyond that, I can't say, because it is unforseeable!
Sounds like a pathetic rallying cry to me.
I think we disagree on a fundamental level about what conditions laws are enforced, and how often they're broken but not enforced. I think this problem has contributed to the number of unreasonable laws that are 'optionally enforced'.
So you want to make it easier to enforce the unreasonable laws across the board?
Sodomy laws were very difficult to enforce. The only reason the case that resulted in the SCOTUS striking down Texas' law was seen is because one of the guy's neighbors narced on them (with a false accusation), and then the police busted in and caught them.
If the neighbor had been able to view the real-time footage of the guys illegal actions, would that have been better, or worse, for his narcing?
What's more, there is a big difference between your neighbor narcing on your thoughtcrime (did you really commit it?), the government revealing they have evidence of your thought crime (do they really), and the entire society having equal access to the evidence of it, as well as evidence to their own, their neighbors, and the govenerment's thoughtcrimes - at which point it makes a lot less sense to punish you for yours.
First, you will never have equal access to the government's crimes. Even a fantasy non-corrupt 100% benevolent government would require some secrecy for national security purposes. A real life government would immediately expand that umbrella to include anything they didn't want you to see. Or rather not would, but is, as our government's assault on the FOIA shows.
Second, your neighbors aren't committing thoughtcrime. At least in their eyes. They are law-abiding citizens who would never smoke pot, sodomize another man, or speak out against the government. Now that they can prove to themselves that they are not ThoughtCriminals and you are, why exactly does it make less sense for them to persecute you for it?
It is [currently] hard to doctor realtime video and sound - especially when you don't know what is going to happen ahead of time.
But it isn't going to be real time when the footage is brought forward in a court of law, is it?
But that wasn't my point. I'm assuming that the people accused of ThoughtCrime really did commit it. The point was that you still cannot assume that you will know what the government is doing, because they will control the access to that information, and can produce whatever information they want.
Does it matter if the press releases a report indicating that the chocolate ration has increased, or if MiniTrue smudges the raw data coming out of the chocolate distributors to indicate that more chocolate is being produced and consumed?
The fact is that these heinous deviants are neither heinous nor very deviant. Facts that have only recently "come to light" as more of these folk have "come out of the closet." I think this case is in my favor, as a more transparent society has shown these laws to be rediculous pretenses for random prejudice.
Try telling that to a fundamentalist Christian. I seem to have missed when Jerry Falwell said "Oh, now that lots of homos are coming out of the closet, I realize that they aren't the godless affronts against nature I thought they were, and I'm cool with them now."
The change in the fortunes of homosexuals has nothing to do with a transparent society. It came from the same source as for minorities and women -- standing up and demanding their rights, and refusing to be silenced. Being able to peer into their lives had nothing to do with it. In fact, much like with blacks and women, standing up and making themselves known made their lives more difficult. Certainly early on and to a lesser extent even today, anyone who did "come out" was in physical danger. But I suppose the distinction between refusing to hide and allowing oneself to be spied upon is not one you'll see.
See; we do disagree. I think that a more transparent society has brought about the downfall of so
In 1984, the problem is not that the government knows what you're doing or not - it is that they are the only authority. If everyone had access to the data, they could not lie or mislead the public about what is or is not going on.
This is simply untrue. The problem was not that the government had sole access to information, it was that the government had access to that information and had the power to act upon it. Did it matter that both the government and your neighbor knew you had committed ThoughtCrime? No, you would still disappear. Remember how neighbors were encouraged to spy on and report their neighbors, and children on their parents? The government used the people as part of their spy network -- given that, how would giving your spying neighbors access to the same information as your government -help-?
And don't forget that the data can be doctored just as surely as a news reel about that data can be doctored.
The truth is that nobody cares how many condoms you buy, but if they did, they could find out (or at least the government could).
Now that we're talking about reality, you're even more wrong. There certainly are people who care how many condoms you buy. And they care about who you use those condoms with, and exactly what you do with them. How do you reconcile your transparent society with our society that until recently had places where it was illegal for a couple to have anal sex in the privacy of their own home? Take away the privacy that makes finding these heinous deviants difficult, and you make matters worse, not better.
Credit card records, receipts, video, or just going through your trash.
I have yet to hear of a forensic technique that can overcome the effects of a shredder followed by an incinerator. But if the government has to sift through the trash of 200 million Americans in order to find out who is buying excessive amounts of condoms, I can live with that.
You do live in an aquarium - though the water may be a little murky, all's that's needed for a clear view is a little effort by the owner of the tank.
In most cases, "clearing the water" is illegal In those cases where it isn't (the police, with a warrant), it should be more difficult to do so and have greater oversight.
So long as it remains difficult to spy on each individual, then the overwhelming ratio of individuals to those willing and able to make the effort to spy then we are not living in aquariums. Give complete access to everyone's lives, and you've turned "ThoughtCrime" legislation like the sodomy laws go from being statements of moral distaste to a practical enforcement scenario.
You cannot equate the ability of the police to spy on an individual and thus eliminate that individual's privacy with ubiquitous surveillance that makes spying on everyone easy and eliminates everyone's privacy. As long as the effort required to spy on an individual is not insubstantial, and more to the point must be done on an individual basis, then the notion of privacy does still exist.
The only reason you want that aquarium in a secure location is because you trust the government or you haven't considered the issue.
I don't trust the government at all, which is why I want the aquarium in a secure location. You are the one who has not considered the consequences of taking a society that very much wants to regulate what you do behind closed doors and then removing the ability to close your doors. You have not considered reality and how a transparent society would work in the real world, where live-and-let-live idealized libertarians are a tiny portion of the population, and certainly not represented in government. Transparent society could only lead to greater freedom in a perfectly tolerant utopia. It cannot bring said utopia about, and in the absence absence of utopia aids totalitarianism.
I'm actually NOT advocating putting cameras on every corner. But there
Just what basic workplace tasks does Mozilla do? Browse the web? Handle e-mail?
:)
No. Waste time. Duh.
I love the comment, "[the kids] weren't feeling good about it".
No shit.
Whatever happened to feeling good about yourself because you accomplished something, not because conditions were set up from the beginning to guarantee your success?
You know, I never felt that good after playing kickball in elementary. Then again, a lot of my peers that felt great after kickball didn't feel so good once they got their math tests back. So god damn what? Should we have eliminated the competition from the kickball games, and not actually corrected the math tests?
No, damnit. You don't eliminate the possibilty of success and failure; you find out what the kid is good at so they can feel good about that, and you help them get better at what they aren't good at so they can feel good about that, too.
Learning how to cope with failure and the idea that you aren't going to be great (or even competent) at everything you do is a crucial thing for kids to learn before they turn ten, much less enter the real world.
Oh yeah, and my friends and I would play versions of tag that allowed for you to be smarter by having strategicly placed "safe" spots, and the smartest yet slowest of us could be infuriatingly hard to catch. Are the adults too stupid to think of this kind of thing? Yes.