A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
An empty aphorism. It is no more useful or convincing than the innumerable minor variants:
"A democracy/monarchy/theocracy/ representative-republic can only exist until the voters/nobility/priesthood/senators discover they can give themselves largess from the public"
I don't want to find myself actively carving up people in Wolfenstein 3D, no matter how evil I believe Nazi's are, because it's participatory violence.
Your claim to have written 10 books is undermined by this blatant inability to use the apostrophe in a linguistically correct fashion.
You actively participate in the violence of (as an example) GTA
False. A player of GTA cannot participate in any violence. They can interact with depictions of violence, but no actual violence takes place. To say that GTA features participatory violence is equivalent to claiming that Arnod Schwarzeneger has killed more than 80 people with gunfire.
It is physically impossible for any computer game (or film, or book) to contain violence.
probably about half the stuff on P2P isn't copyrighted material either. It's Photos of people with their friends, sound bites, home made porn, both image and videos, Home made videos ala star wars kid. Entire fake harry potter books
One hundred percent of the things you just listed are copyrighted.
Just because it was produced by amateurs instead of large corporations doesn't mean there's no copyright.
That is the pitfall of having a business that brokers a constitutional right.
Uh huh, so newspapers (which broker speech) have no right to refuse advertising they find offensive? Nice try.
You could possibly have a legal reason to refuse to sell someone a gun, but if it's not one of the clearly defined reasons, you're gonna get rocked in a court house.
Do you have any link to substantiate that? I don't think so. (That NRA page you keep linking absolutely doesn't qualify. As has been explained, it mentions laws PROHIBITING sale, not OBLIGATING it)
So, if you win a contract with Lockheed Martin you can not use GCC (for example) unless they approve it.
You are drastically overinterpreting the plausible scope of "use in connection with". Prehaps their lawyers were a little vague, but the only sane interpretation (the only one consistent with the rest of that contract text) is to mean "as part of the deliverables".
Given that the whole contract is only applicable in to suppliers who "represent" themselves as authors of the software, it makes perfect sense. The customer of a work-for-hire will be the owner of the eventual copyright, so it's her discretion as to what Open Source licenses it might be supplied under.
All he said was, it doesn't solve all memory problems.
No, he said it solves one and only one problem, and a problem which is so obselete that solutions are usually worthless. Thus, he's saying that GC is worthless except on those uncommon systems where memory leaks last after a process ends. That claim is factually incorrect on multiple levels.
All that says is that if you sign up to sell Lockheed some software, they're paying for something they'll own, not a Free thing you downloaded and repackage. That's obligatory if they intend to resell the project, because it would be unethical to secretly mix GPL into your proprietary projects without giving customers the source.
Incidently, Lockheed uses ADA in several of their projects, including the GNU gnat compiler.
having fair skin light eyes and light hair causes people to immediately treat you differently.
Pale skin makes you more visible, particularly at night. That is a disadvantage in dangerous, combat situations where people are likely to try killing you. But in semi-modern societies where group cooperation is valuable, it makes your facial expressions easier to read and increases socialization.
At least, that's how I account for the fact that even Bantu Africans have a marked preference for paler skin (and assuming it isn't a kind of Euro-envy)
He only brought that up later, and even then I think a lot of it was hidden from the general population.
No, it wasn't hidden, that would've been counter-productive. The average voter was MORE Jew-hating than Hitler, and he leveraged that fact to boost his popularity when things got rough.
For example, the Nazi philosophy of eugenics logically dictated that truely moronic retards should be the first people removed from the population. But the public wouldn't stand for that kind of cruelty, so Hitler switched to the Jews, which were an easier to convince his people to kill.
He rose to power by basically going up against the communists
True. And since the communists were atheists, they didn't think religious heritage was important, so they were the only German political party to accept Jews as full members. That association further encouraged Nazi judenhas (making it more plausible that Jews were secretly influencing the USSR to damage Germany)
Because there are many atheists who -believe- there is no god.
It's far more common for an atheist to believe there is no God than that there is no god.
Capitalized "God" is a specific named individual (aka "Yahweh" or "Jehova" or "Jesus"), revered by at least 4 difference religions, and attributed with specific traits, some of which are mutually contradictory. Lowercase "god" is an individual of power greatly exceeding any human being, who may or may not be alleged to be virtuous, honest, or any of that.
Because "god" potentially includes evil tricksters, skeptics are more likely to call it an irrelevant concept instead of a demonstrably false one.
even if there must be a designer, why the Christian God? There is a leap made there in ID that reveals the movememt for what it is: Creationism, wrapped in pseudo-scientific language.
As the nytimes article showed, professional ID proponents are actually careful never to make that leap when going about their business. You can look backwards at their prior espoused beliefs, but they are nonspecific about the Designer's identity in their official propaganda.
But maybe someone else did
Ha! Nobody else read it, not even me.
Or maybe I'll get a mod point. I could use a mod point.
Evolution is not atheism. It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest as much
I think you mean "natural selection" instead of "evolution". NS is the kind of evolution which is opposed by Intelligent Design. Hypothetically, an invisible UFO could be flying around abducting organisms for genetic engineering. If that were true, then (guided) evolution would be happening but not natural selection.
That's why ID-supporters try to remember to say they're fighting against "Natural Selection" or "Darwinism", as opposed to merely evolution.
It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest as much
They're not exactly the same thing, but in practice they are highly related. While not all religions claim to explain the origin of life on earth, all of the most popular ones do. So, believing in NS contradicts the main theist creeds.
Furthermore, there is empirical measurement. Just check out this survey. Scroll down to the yellow chart and compare the first and last columns- see how predictably God goes down when Evolution goes up.
What do you call a proprietary format that is well understood and widely used by the computer-using community
Do you actually think MS Word's format is well understood or widely correctly used? Just look at how OpenOffice mangles it to see your argument collapse into powder.
Ah yes but the point is that it only matters that for any road everyone applies the same standard
Vehicles are built to go on the left OR right, not both. To maximize visual range for safety, the driver must be as close to the center of the street as possible.
It is unsafe to operate UK cars on the mainland. Therefore, the hardship exists even when each street unit is self-consistent.
The Bush family dynasty is the prime example of how this theory fails miserably.
Contradicting yourself very strongly. Family dynasties were tremendously more important in pre-modern societies. You know, monarchies? Where heriditary power included literally whimsical life or death? And the duke could invoke premire noctum rights to try impregnating every single mature woman in his fiefdom?
He makes NO reference to money's impact on a gene's survival, merely on it's lack of impact on a gene's "hardiness".
In this context, there is essentially no difference between "hardiness" and ability to survive. (Even in general usage, "hardiness" and "survivability" are virtually synonyms).
But, I'm sure this is all obvious, since you are smarter than me.
Well, yes it is quite obvious. And if you can't tell, that does strongly suggest you are less intelligent (or are prehaps writing in a non-native language, or otherwise disadvantaged to understand)
Surely any half-intelligent suicide bomber would use a dead man's switch?
That'd be an unnecessary complexity. Seriously, the number of times that a suicide bomber has been shot dead by a guard while already in range of someone he'd like to blast? That hardly ever happens.
Carrying deadman switches would be counter-productive to the terrorists in 2 ways: (a) more likely to accidently explode yourself at home or en route. (b) police guards will become less likely to accidently kill innocent people, which indirectly helps you create more terror.
off topic, but training to incapacitate with a firearm is a great way to get yourself or others hurt.
That's true if and only if police shoot only at people who are presenting a threat of some kind. Sadly, the incidences of police shooting a fleeing suspect through the back are quite numerous.
Just tell them to use Mandriva! Do not tell them to use just "Linux" because then you will give them problems.
So then what can a software developer label on her box as requirements for an application to run? That's where the whole complexity problem of Linux distros comes from.
Its like if someone bought a computer and you tell them "you can install Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4, Windows XP, Windows 2004
No, it's not like that. Amoung Windows users, only weirdos use anything other than WinXP. If a person has to ask what kind of Windows they need, then the answer is XP. That's the current version, and the only version that matters (except for unsual obselete hardware or apps)
But in the Linux world, there are new installs going on every day of Fedora, Novell, Gentoo, Mandriva, Lindows, Debian, and even Slackware. None of them is inarguably the best for a new desktop PC install.
My definition of "fitness" is the ability to procreate without the help of technology - medical or otherwise
So, you are making up your own words unlike those used in the English language or by biologists in particular. If you wanted to invent your own language, don't make it sound so much like the one other people already use.
If you can't do that yourself, or could not have lived to an age to do that yourself, yes I believe you're a detriment to the gene pool (Darwin-isticially speaking).
That is emphatically and obviously false, unless you have some reason to believe that reproductive assistance technology will become less available in the future.
I am simply supporting the idea that evolution has, for all intents and purposes, stopped in the human population due to these factors.
No, you are NOT supporting that idea. You are claiming that evolution is now moving in a direction (technology required for reproduction) which you don't like.
You think that's a negative change? Fine- but it's still a CHANGE, which is all that "evolution" means.
Maybe someday the human male will evolve with internal testicles so the sperm is impotent without artificial cooling. That idea may disgust you, but it's an example of (potential) evolution.
How does that make my actual claim (that GC is only really useful for addressing one class of programmer error) wrong?
It can be really hard to explain something that's already been made self-evident, but I'll try.
You acknowledge that some GCs do not collect at shutdown. But you also claim that GCs accomplish nothing useful except terminal reclamation. Therefore, you are stating that a substantial segment of GCs have been authored for positively no reason whatsoever. And since programmers are rather loathe to do work for no reason (that would be absurd), it is much more likely that your earlier claim was simply wrong.
As it is, for other reasons too. Your claims have been unfounded, supported by nothing more than your personal authoritativeness.
Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed.
Remember, boys and girls, begging the question only works when everyone else is too polite to point out how stupid you sound.
If your ownership strategy isn't clear or the owner doesn't have the knowledge/ability to release its resource(s) promptly
No problem! The resource is owned by the GC, which has the knowledge and ability to release it properly, so all is well.
I'm just getting sick of comic book movies, even the good ones. They're becoming so predictable:
Funny, I can't really manage to fit Sin City into that pattern. Maybe you meant to say "Superhero" in there someplace... but if you find the movie versions predictable, then they're just being true to the source material! The original comics are, if anything, much more predictable, because the writers of individual issues have less freedom to make permanent changes to any character. They're just turning the crank: "Crime, fight, escape, repeat".
they should start the movie 5 years into the hero's career. This was my major complaint with Fantastic Four.
Slashdot Mirror
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
An empty aphorism. It is no more useful or convincing than the innumerable minor variants:
"A democracy/monarchy/theocracy/ representative-republic can only exist until the voters/nobility/priesthood/senators discover they can give themselves largess from the public"
I don't want to find myself actively carving up people in Wolfenstein 3D, no matter how evil I believe Nazi's are, because it's participatory violence.
Your claim to have written 10 books is undermined by this blatant inability to use the apostrophe in a linguistically correct fashion.
You actively participate in the violence of (as an example) GTA
False. A player of GTA cannot participate in any violence. They can interact with depictions of violence, but no actual violence takes place. To say that GTA features participatory violence is equivalent to claiming that Arnod Schwarzeneger has killed more than 80 people with gunfire.
It is physically impossible for any computer game (or film, or book) to contain violence.
This "war" is a cash cow for at least some people involved.
Yes, like all the dealers and runners who make big, untaxed money and who otherwise would be totally out-competed by conventional farmers.
probably about half the stuff on P2P isn't copyrighted material either. It's Photos of people with their friends, sound bites, home made porn, both image and videos, Home made videos ala star wars kid. Entire fake harry potter books
One hundred percent of the things you just listed are copyrighted.
Just because it was produced by amateurs instead of large corporations doesn't mean there's no copyright.
That is the pitfall of having a business that brokers a constitutional right.
Uh huh, so newspapers (which broker speech) have no right to refuse advertising they find offensive? Nice try.
You could possibly have a legal reason to refuse to sell someone a gun, but if it's not one of the clearly defined reasons, you're gonna get rocked in a court house.
Do you have any link to substantiate that? I don't think so. (That NRA page you keep linking absolutely doesn't qualify. As has been explained, it mentions laws PROHIBITING sale, not OBLIGATING it)
If you do, then please forward it to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose organization is refused as a customer by Barret firearms.
So, if you win a contract with Lockheed Martin you can not use GCC (for example) unless they approve it.
You are drastically overinterpreting the plausible scope of "use in connection with". Prehaps their lawyers were a little vague, but the only sane interpretation (the only one consistent with the rest of that contract text) is to mean "as part of the deliverables".
Given that the whole contract is only applicable in to suppliers who "represent" themselves as authors of the software, it makes perfect sense. The customer of a work-for-hire will be the owner of the eventual copyright, so it's her discretion as to what Open Source licenses it might be supplied under.
All he said was, it doesn't solve all memory problems.
No, he said it solves one and only one problem, and a problem which is so obselete that solutions are usually worthless. Thus, he's saying that GC is worthless except on those uncommon systems where memory leaks last after a process ends. That claim is factually incorrect on multiple levels.
the word open source (sorry PDF. See clause 11)
All that says is that if you sign up to sell Lockheed some software, they're paying for something they'll own, not a Free thing you downloaded and repackage. That's obligatory if they intend to resell the project, because it would be unethical to secretly mix GPL into your proprietary projects without giving customers the source.
Incidently, Lockheed uses ADA in several of their projects, including the GNU gnat compiler.
having fair skin light eyes and light hair causes people to immediately treat you differently.
Pale skin makes you more visible, particularly at night. That is a disadvantage in dangerous, combat situations where people are likely to try killing you. But in semi-modern societies where group cooperation is valuable, it makes your facial expressions easier to read and increases socialization.
At least, that's how I account for the fact that even Bantu Africans have a marked preference for paler skin (and assuming it isn't a kind of Euro-envy)
He only brought that up later, and even then I think a lot of it was hidden from the general population.
No, it wasn't hidden, that would've been counter-productive. The average voter was MORE Jew-hating than Hitler, and he leveraged that fact to boost his popularity when things got rough.
For example, the Nazi philosophy of eugenics logically dictated that truely moronic retards should be the first people removed from the population. But the public wouldn't stand for that kind of cruelty, so Hitler switched to the Jews, which were an easier to convince his people to kill.
He rose to power by basically going up against the communists
True. And since the communists were atheists, they didn't think religious heritage was important, so they were the only German political party to accept Jews as full members. That association further encouraged Nazi judenhas (making it more plausible that Jews were secretly influencing the USSR to damage Germany)
Then we need a new word.
Antitheist. You're welcome!
Because there are many atheists who -believe- there is no god.
It's far more common for an atheist to believe there is no God than that there is no god.
Capitalized "God" is a specific named individual (aka "Yahweh" or "Jehova" or "Jesus"), revered by at least 4 difference religions, and attributed with specific traits, some of which are mutually contradictory. Lowercase "god" is an individual of power greatly exceeding any human being, who may or may not be alleged to be virtuous, honest, or any of that.
Because "god" potentially includes evil tricksters, skeptics are more likely to call it an irrelevant concept instead of a demonstrably false one.
even if there must be a designer, why the Christian God? There is a leap made there in ID that reveals the movememt for what it is: Creationism, wrapped in pseudo-scientific language.
As the nytimes article showed, professional ID proponents are actually careful never to make that leap when going about their business. You can look backwards at their prior espoused beliefs, but they are nonspecific about the Designer's identity in their official propaganda.
But maybe someone else did
Ha! Nobody else read it, not even me.
Or maybe I'll get a mod point. I could use a mod point.
Ha! No karma for you!
Evolution is not atheism. It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest as much
I think you mean "natural selection" instead of "evolution". NS is the kind of evolution which is opposed by Intelligent Design. Hypothetically, an invisible UFO could be flying around abducting organisms for genetic engineering. If that were true, then (guided) evolution would be happening but not natural selection.
That's why ID-supporters try to remember to say they're fighting against "Natural Selection" or "Darwinism", as opposed to merely evolution.
It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest as much
They're not exactly the same thing, but in practice they are highly related. While not all religions claim to explain the origin of life on earth, all of the most popular ones do. So, believing in NS contradicts the main theist creeds.
Furthermore, there is empirical measurement. Just check out this survey. Scroll down to the yellow chart and compare the first and last columns- see how predictably God goes down when Evolution goes up.
What do you call a proprietary format that is well understood and widely used by the computer-using community
Do you actually think MS Word's format is well understood or widely correctly used? Just look at how OpenOffice mangles it to see your argument collapse into powder.
Ah yes but the point is that it only matters that for any road everyone applies the same standard
Vehicles are built to go on the left OR right, not both. To maximize visual range for safety, the driver must be as close to the center of the street as possible.
It is unsafe to operate UK cars on the mainland. Therefore, the hardship exists even when each street unit is self-consistent.
The Bush family dynasty is the prime example of how this theory fails miserably.
Contradicting yourself very strongly. Family dynasties were tremendously more important in pre-modern societies. You know, monarchies? Where heriditary power included literally whimsical life or death? And the duke could invoke premire noctum rights to try impregnating every single mature woman in his fiefdom?
He makes NO reference to money's impact on a gene's survival, merely on it's lack of impact on a gene's "hardiness".
In this context, there is essentially no difference between "hardiness" and ability to survive. (Even in general usage, "hardiness" and "survivability" are virtually synonyms).
But, I'm sure this is all obvious, since you are smarter than me.
Well, yes it is quite obvious. And if you can't tell, that does strongly suggest you are less intelligent (or are prehaps writing in a non-native language, or otherwise disadvantaged to understand)
Surely any half-intelligent suicide bomber would use a dead man's switch?
That'd be an unnecessary complexity. Seriously, the number of times that a suicide bomber has been shot dead by a guard while already in range of someone he'd like to blast? That hardly ever happens.
Carrying deadman switches would be counter-productive to the terrorists in 2 ways:
(a) more likely to accidently explode yourself at home or en route.
(b) police guards will become less likely to accidently kill innocent people, which indirectly helps you create more terror.
And the cop who had him pinned was as surprised
That makes it seem as if there was only one cop holding him, when really there was one on each arm and one more on his legs + belly.
off topic, but training to incapacitate with a firearm is a great way to get yourself or others hurt.
That's true if and only if police shoot only at people who are presenting a threat of some kind. Sadly, the incidences of police shooting a fleeing suspect through the back are quite numerous.
Just tell them to use Mandriva! Do not tell them to use just "Linux" because then you will give them problems.
So then what can a software developer label on her box as requirements for an application to run? That's where the whole complexity problem of Linux distros comes from.
Its like if someone bought a computer and you tell them "you can install Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4, Windows XP, Windows 2004
No, it's not like that. Amoung Windows users, only weirdos use anything other than WinXP. If a person has to ask what kind of Windows they need, then the answer is XP. That's the current version, and the only version that matters (except for unsual obselete hardware or apps)
But in the Linux world, there are new installs going on every day of Fedora, Novell, Gentoo, Mandriva, Lindows, Debian, and even Slackware. None of them is inarguably the best for a new desktop PC install.
My definition of "fitness" is the ability to procreate without the help of technology - medical or otherwise
So, you are making up your own words unlike those used in the English language or by biologists in particular. If you wanted to invent your own language, don't make it sound so much like the one other people already use.
If you can't do that yourself, or could not have lived to an age to do that yourself, yes I believe you're a detriment to the gene pool (Darwin-isticially speaking).
That is emphatically and obviously false, unless you have some reason to believe that reproductive assistance technology will become less available in the future.
I am simply supporting the idea that evolution has, for all intents and purposes, stopped in the human population due to these factors.
No, you are NOT supporting that idea. You are claiming that evolution is now moving in a direction (technology required for reproduction) which you don't like.
You think that's a negative change? Fine- but it's still a CHANGE, which is all that "evolution" means.
Maybe someday the human male will evolve with internal testicles so the sperm is impotent without artificial cooling. That idea may disgust you, but it's an example of (potential) evolution.
How does that make my actual claim (that GC is only really useful for addressing one class of programmer error) wrong?
It can be really hard to explain something that's already been made self-evident, but I'll try.
You acknowledge that some GCs do not collect at shutdown. But you also claim that GCs accomplish nothing useful except terminal reclamation. Therefore, you are stating that a substantial segment of GCs have been authored for positively no reason whatsoever. And since programmers are rather loathe to do work for no reason (that would be absurd), it is much more likely that your earlier claim was simply wrong.
As it is, for other reasons too. Your claims have been unfounded, supported by nothing more than your personal authoritativeness.
Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed.
Remember, boys and girls, begging the question only works when everyone else is too polite to point out how stupid you sound.
If your ownership strategy isn't clear or the owner doesn't have the knowledge/ability to release its resource(s) promptly
No problem! The resource is owned by the GC, which has the knowledge and ability to release it properly, so all is well.
I'm just getting sick of comic book movies, even the good ones. They're becoming so predictable:
Funny, I can't really manage to fit Sin City into that pattern. Maybe you meant to say "Superhero" in there someplace... but if you find the movie versions predictable, then they're just being true to the source material! The original comics are, if anything, much more predictable, because the writers of individual issues have less freedom to make permanent changes to any character. They're just turning the crank: "Crime, fight, escape, repeat".
they should start the movie 5 years into the hero's career. This was my major complaint with Fantastic Four.
Try "The Incredibles"