That just proves that our intelligent designer is a lazy bastard who copied most of his work from the chimps' intelligent designer.
Mod it funny, but that's precisely the response I've gotten. How can you argue with someone who agrees with you?
The strategy behind intelligent design is to agree with all the proposed mechanisms and the conclusions but to use a few discrepancies in data to assert that God makes it all happen.
You can always break libertarians into two camps because there really is no "true" libertarianism. The most erudite libertarians are libertarian conservatives and libertarian liberals, but they are at heart conservatives or liberals.
The reason is that the only complete ideologies in Western thought are liberalism and conservativism, and they stem from a dialog over very fundamental disagreements. Libertarianism has never really been a mainstream part of that dialog. They even intuitively recognize the need for a dialog and so invented authoritarianism, but that's obviously a farce because behavior isn't the same as ideology.
Most libertarians are one-issue ideologues, often anti-drug types or small-government types. These aren't necessarily invalid points of view, but they usually don't have a coherent answer to "big picture" questions and are the main reason it's so hard to get elected running as a libertarian despite their numbers.
So the only reason you're not a lefty is because of some ridiculous notion that we're all a bunch of treehuggers who smell like peyote and have drum circles?
Yeah, let's not forget that the vicious radicals, the corrupt unionists, the Machiavellian realists and all manner of smug, clueless moralists are all leftists too.
I'm sure there are a number of timestamp services, but I've used digistamp.com. The service claims it was designed by scientists and certainly seems to meet some of their IP needs. It's based on RFC3161.
Essentially you generate a checksum and they digitally sign the checksum + the time. So it's crypto proof that at that time T you had a document with checksum C. (You're tied to the document by your account.)
You can, for example, timestamp a PDF file. It integrates with Acrobat pretty well.
I think this is the way to go. For example, you could back up your files every night and timestamp them, so if someone is working concurrently on the same idea as you and a dispute happens as to what day you added a particular feature, you would have evidence. I've used it to "notarize" some PDFs and other stuff.
I have no idea if there have been any legal challenges to this. Digistamp claims that their system has hardware specially designed by IBM to be hard to crack. As far as that goes... well, they're not Diebold...
The fact is that the UN, while it does have a lot of problems, is also far more effective and dare-I-say-it even important than most people in the US ever give it credit for. It's far from a perfect system, but it's still the best we have.
The UN tends to keep the various powers, especially European and Russian, but also China and Japan, tied up in red tape so they are less inclined to engage in world wars. It also sets up a standard system whereby brutal third world dictators can demand and receive handouts while they butcher their people. This isn't far from its original intent: to get various nations to sit down and talk rather than invading each other, but it's nothing like the vision the one world government people have for it.
The usual critique of democracy is that it's far from perfect, but that it's the best we have. The UN is also the best we have, but it is absolutely awful. There is *nothing* in the UN's charter or design that would ever make them lift a finger to stop a genocide.
Also, don't you want the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to apply to US Citizens in a US Court or on the streets?
Not particularly. Have you actually read the thing? Well, I haven't, because it's ridiculously long, but I skimmed it pretty well. It's missing some key stuff, like an equivalent to the US Constitution's tenth ammendment. The framers realized one key point: many people will only tend to agree on a few fundamentals. So your key documents should be short and sweet (and, consequently, timeless!) and the more local bodies will go into more detail.
but we also still have a lot to do, and to accomplish, as a nation and as members of larger world
Nations don't have agendas, and, being sovereign, they are not members of anything larger. Your intentions may be laudable, but they require that the modern nation-state change into something fundamentally different from what it is. The liberal democratic nation state has served us poorly to decently for the last few hundred years and has been an order of magnitude better than anything that came before it. And most of the experiments of the last century have been tragedies orders of magnitude larger than anything humanity could conceive of.
The point is, is that these companies are not being fair about the renegotiations. There are actually no negotiations going on at all. They just change the contract, tell you if you don't like it, you can leave, and you may not even have any idea that we've changed the contract until it's too late.
IANAL, but taking Google's TOS as an example, I think it's a license, not a contract. Reasons: 1. They don't call it a contract; it's a "legal agreement." 2. There are no negotiations, and no way to submit ammendments. 3. You're not paying for the services and they're not promising to deliver anything. 4. You are never identified as being party to the agreement.
It's perfectly reasonable to update a license. For example, if someone comes to my house, I'm implicitly granting them license to come in. If I decide one day that I'm not going to allow smoking in my house, I don't have to tell them about that, even if I let them smoke in it earlier.
It's kind of sad that something like this has to be decided in court, and isn't actually just common sense.
Hold on a second. Why is it that when we sign up for a web site we don't just get an RSS feed of the terms of service? If that was standard practice then the courts might have ruled the other way.
I don't know why anybody would think an online contract would be any different. The whole idea of changing a contract after someone has already agreed it is ludicrous.
You're making a big assumption about what is common sense, just as people make big assumptions about what is obvious in patent disputes. What courts and legislatures do is look at many individual cases and try to glean common sense in a more methodical way, relying less on assumptions and more on evidence and common practice.
That's also the reason we have many small governments rather than one global government: different people do things different ways because it works well enough for them and they can't just change it willy nilly without someone losing out.
I wasn't going to go that far, because the amount of physical work that even a very active person does is trivial compared to the amount of calories in even a very constricted diet.
You've got to think of it as a dynamic process. A body is pretty good at estimating how many calories it needs each day. Think about it, if 3500 extra calories give you one pound of fat, a little over 100 calories a day leads to a pound of fat each month, or 12 pounds in a year. Your daily exercise is relevant because it's about the amount people are typically overeating.
If your calorific intake is really that low, and output is that high, you may just be that 1% or whatever minority it is
Ooh, let me end this sentence: "that is able to defy thermodynamics."
If calories in are less than calories out, you'll lose fat. It's physically impossible not to. Any discussion of weight control has to start with this simple fact.
If you don't like the state of HTML, come over and help make it better.
A lot of folks think that many of the basic concepts underlying HTML (and XML...) are utterly wrong-headed. I don't mean to accuse you of groupthink, but I doubt that the working group would be even remotely open to the idea that they should scrap it and start over from scratch.
Sure some people were born dirt poor, and end up with money to burn, and some people are born with the silver spoon in their mouths and die on the streets, but the very vast majority of people will remain in the class they're born into for the rest of their lives. This is not a coincidence.
It's a fact that the vast majority of millionaires+ are self-made (i.e. did not inherit substantial wealth) and that inherited wealth rarely lasts more than a few generations (because rich guy #1 passes it on to 20 heirs, who each pass it on to 20 heirs, and most heirs aren't particularly entrepreneurial). Almost everyone goes through several tax brackets in their life, starting out as dirt poor when they're young and accumulating a comfortable retirement by the time they're old. The tools to become wealthy are universally available: education and qualification can be had in any field imaginable and once you've made some money, it takes no special qualifications to invest it in any area you choose.
Class mobility and the "American Dream" are largely hoaxes perpetrated by the rich on the middle and lower classes
Explain this. What do "the rich" get from this hoax? How have they collectively perpetrated it? And virtually everyone in the middle class has a shot at it so why is it a hoax for them?
Which is not to say that the military is anything like a meritocracy in its current form, but it's a little better than cash-on-the-barrel-head.
Either you're just spouting off about stuff you're entirely clueless about or you think promotion is based on time in service the way it was in the sixties. It doesn't work that way anymore. If I'm going to a promotion board they evaluate my personal integrity, physical fitness, marksmanship, military and civilian education, military bearing, competence, disciplinary record, how well I know my subordinates, what I've done to develop my subordinates, leadership, and more crap I can't remember. (An example of part of this is the promotion points worksheet, DA Form 3355.) It's different (and harder) for commissioned officers.
Is it strictly meritocratic? Probably not, but the promotion system has a concrete purpose, and it's not to be buzzword compliant.
It wouldn't have had all the carrier dependent features
That's it in a nutshell and, sadly, it works. US carriers deliberately make their features incompatible to prevent unlocked phones from becoming popular. They have the same mentality (and business model, more or less) as the old phone companies that used to rent you the telephone.
Only in a Mac Land, the trolls are funny. Way to go Mac Moderators.
Which one was the troll? The guy pimping his blog (if he honestly wanted to debate he'd post it to/.) or the guy pointing out, correctly, that we don't care about his blog?
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, the police advise that shop staff follow "SCONE" or "SCOPE" before approaching a suspect:
In the States we don't have scones, so that wouldn't work.
There's a ??? step I'm missing somewhere...
Given that noone had yet eaten at the tree of knowledge, there was no human logic in the world at the time, ergo causality didn't exist.
That just proves that our intelligent designer is a lazy bastard who copied most of his work from the chimps' intelligent designer.
Mod it funny, but that's precisely the response I've gotten. How can you argue with someone who agrees with you?
The strategy behind intelligent design is to agree with all the proposed mechanisms and the conclusions but to use a few discrepancies in data to assert that God makes it all happen.
You can always break libertarians into two camps because there really is no "true" libertarianism. The most erudite libertarians are libertarian conservatives and libertarian liberals, but they are at heart conservatives or liberals.
The reason is that the only complete ideologies in Western thought are liberalism and conservativism, and they stem from a dialog over very fundamental disagreements. Libertarianism has never really been a mainstream part of that dialog. They even intuitively recognize the need for a dialog and so invented authoritarianism, but that's obviously a farce because behavior isn't the same as ideology.
Most libertarians are one-issue ideologues, often anti-drug types or small-government types. These aren't necessarily invalid points of view, but they usually don't have a coherent answer to "big picture" questions and are the main reason it's so hard to get elected running as a libertarian despite their numbers.
So the only reason you're not a lefty is because of some ridiculous notion that we're all a bunch of treehuggers who smell like peyote and have drum circles?
Yeah, let's not forget that the vicious radicals, the corrupt unionists, the Machiavellian realists and all manner of smug, clueless moralists are all leftists too.
Can you cite your source for this data? Or are you just assuming this because some of your friends are libertarians?
Reading comprehension time: "Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?"
I'm sure there are a number of timestamp services, but I've used digistamp.com. The service claims it was designed by scientists and certainly seems to meet some of their IP needs. It's based on RFC3161.
Essentially you generate a checksum and they digitally sign the checksum + the time. So it's crypto proof that at that time T you had a document with checksum C. (You're tied to the document by your account.)
You can, for example, timestamp a PDF file. It integrates with Acrobat pretty well.
I think this is the way to go. For example, you could back up your files every night and timestamp them, so if someone is working concurrently on the same idea as you and a dispute happens as to what day you added a particular feature, you would have evidence. I've used it to "notarize" some PDFs and other stuff.
I have no idea if there have been any legal challenges to this. Digistamp claims that their system has hardware specially designed by IBM to be hard to crack. As far as that goes... well, they're not Diebold...
No, he said music => RIAA, that is !music || RIAA.
The fact is that the UN, while it does have a lot of problems, is also far more effective and dare-I-say-it even important than most people in the US ever give it credit for. It's far from a perfect system, but it's still the best we have.
The UN tends to keep the various powers, especially European and Russian, but also China and Japan, tied up in red tape so they are less inclined to engage in world wars. It also sets up a standard system whereby brutal third world dictators can demand and receive handouts while they butcher their people. This isn't far from its original intent: to get various nations to sit down and talk rather than invading each other, but it's nothing like the vision the one world government people have for it.
The usual critique of democracy is that it's far from perfect, but that it's the best we have. The UN is also the best we have, but it is absolutely awful. There is *nothing* in the UN's charter or design that would ever make them lift a finger to stop a genocide.
Also, don't you want the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to apply to US Citizens in a US Court or on the streets?
Not particularly. Have you actually read the thing? Well, I haven't, because it's ridiculously long, but I skimmed it pretty well. It's missing some key stuff, like an equivalent to the US Constitution's tenth ammendment. The framers realized one key point: many people will only tend to agree on a few fundamentals. So your key documents should be short and sweet (and, consequently, timeless!) and the more local bodies will go into more detail.
but we also still have a lot to do, and to accomplish, as a nation and as members of larger world
Nations don't have agendas, and, being sovereign, they are not members of anything larger. Your intentions may be laudable, but they require that the modern nation-state change into something fundamentally different from what it is. The liberal democratic nation state has served us poorly to decently for the last few hundred years and has been an order of magnitude better than anything that came before it. And most of the experiments of the last century have been tragedies orders of magnitude larger than anything humanity could conceive of.
The point is, is that these companies are not being fair about the renegotiations. There are actually no negotiations going on at all. They just change the contract, tell you if you don't like it, you can leave, and you may not even have any idea that we've changed the contract until it's too late.
IANAL, but taking Google's TOS as an example, I think it's a license, not a contract. Reasons: 1. They don't call it a contract; it's a "legal agreement." 2. There are no negotiations, and no way to submit ammendments. 3. You're not paying for the services and they're not promising to deliver anything. 4. You are never identified as being party to the agreement.
It's perfectly reasonable to update a license. For example, if someone comes to my house, I'm implicitly granting them license to come in. If I decide one day that I'm not going to allow smoking in my house, I don't have to tell them about that, even if I let them smoke in it earlier.
It's kind of sad that something like this has to be decided in court, and isn't actually just common sense.
Hold on a second. Why is it that when we sign up for a web site we don't just get an RSS feed of the terms of service? If that was standard practice then the courts might have ruled the other way.
I don't know why anybody would think an online contract would be any different. The whole idea of changing a contract after someone has already agreed it is ludicrous.
You're making a big assumption about what is common sense, just as people make big assumptions about what is obvious in patent disputes. What courts and legislatures do is look at many individual cases and try to glean common sense in a more methodical way, relying less on assumptions and more on evidence and common practice.
That's also the reason we have many small governments rather than one global government: different people do things different ways because it works well enough for them and they can't just change it willy nilly without someone losing out.
I wasn't going to go that far, because the amount of physical work that even a very active person does is trivial compared to the amount of calories in even a very constricted diet.
You've got to think of it as a dynamic process. A body is pretty good at estimating how many calories it needs each day. Think about it, if 3500 extra calories give you one pound of fat, a little over 100 calories a day leads to a pound of fat each month, or 12 pounds in a year. Your daily exercise is relevant because it's about the amount people are typically overeating.
Don't some publications in the English language still use the spellings coöperate and naïve?
Yes, some publications do. Terrorist publications.
You must be an American. I've never seen why people feel they need a "second" PhD.
I've never seen the conspicuous consumption stereotype applied to higher learning. And, yes, I got naturalized Nov 2005.
If your calorific intake is really that low, and output is that high, you may just be that 1% or whatever minority it is
Ooh, let me end this sentence: "that is able to defy thermodynamics."
If calories in are less than calories out, you'll lose fat. It's physically impossible not to. Any discussion of weight control has to start with this simple fact.
If you don't like the state of HTML, come over and help make it better.
A lot of folks think that many of the basic concepts underlying HTML (and XML...) are utterly wrong-headed. I don't mean to accuse you of groupthink, but I doubt that the working group would be even remotely open to the idea that they should scrap it and start over from scratch.
It's the basis for quantum computing, too -- I doubt folks would be wasting their time on THAT if it wasn't valid.
If it's got a cool sounding word like "quantum" in it, the same folks who fund all the XML crap will dump truckloads of money into it.
Guess why the USA has such a tremendous problem with "identity theft"? A much bigger one than in Europe?
Do you have numbers behind that claim?
Sure some people were born dirt poor, and end up with money to burn, and some people are born with the silver spoon in their mouths and die on the streets, but the very vast majority of people will remain in the class they're born into for the rest of their lives. This is not a coincidence.
It's a fact that the vast majority of millionaires+ are self-made (i.e. did not inherit substantial wealth) and that inherited wealth rarely lasts more than a few generations (because rich guy #1 passes it on to 20 heirs, who each pass it on to 20 heirs, and most heirs aren't particularly entrepreneurial). Almost everyone goes through several tax brackets in their life, starting out as dirt poor when they're young and accumulating a comfortable retirement by the time they're old. The tools to become wealthy are universally available: education and qualification can be had in any field imaginable and once you've made some money, it takes no special qualifications to invest it in any area you choose.
Class mobility and the "American Dream" are largely hoaxes perpetrated by the rich on the middle and lower classes
Explain this. What do "the rich" get from this hoax? How have they collectively perpetrated it? And virtually everyone in the middle class has a shot at it so why is it a hoax for them?
Which is not to say that the military is anything like a meritocracy in its current form, but it's a little better than cash-on-the-barrel-head.
Either you're just spouting off about stuff you're entirely clueless about or you think promotion is based on time in service the way it was in the sixties. It doesn't work that way anymore. If I'm going to a promotion board they evaluate my personal integrity, physical fitness, marksmanship, military and civilian education, military bearing, competence, disciplinary record, how well I know my subordinates, what I've done to develop my subordinates, leadership, and more crap I can't remember. (An example of part of this is the promotion points worksheet, DA Form 3355.) It's different (and harder) for commissioned officers.
Is it strictly meritocratic? Probably not, but the promotion system has a concrete purpose, and it's not to be buzzword compliant.
And a supercollider is the transformation of a hell of a lot of money into blinky little puffs of light.
Hold on, let me run Slashdot Genuine Advantage(TM) to see if we're reading a Genuine Duplicate(TM) of an article... yup, we sure are!
Why don't you tell us what you *really* think?
It wouldn't have had all the carrier dependent features
That's it in a nutshell and, sadly, it works. US carriers deliberately make their features incompatible to prevent unlocked phones from becoming popular. They have the same mentality (and business model, more or less) as the old phone companies that used to rent you the telephone.
Only in a Mac Land, the trolls are funny. Way to go Mac Moderators.
/.) or the guy pointing out, correctly, that we don't care about his blog?
Which one was the troll? The guy pimping his blog (if he honestly wanted to debate he'd post it to