If Microsoft had the physical presence and quality support that Apple offers,./ might not feel so unkindly towards them.
A lot of the pro-Apple feeling comes from the fact that Apple offers good service and support. Within the limits of being a for-profit capitalist entity, their whole business model and attitude is far friendlier to the consumer than Microsoft's.
But that's the point, says the FSF! They're deeply hostile to consumers because they use DRM on their iPhone!
So what? I don't like DRM, so I don't buy an iPhone. It's not like Apple is forcing one on me, or using monopoly powers to spread their DRM to all mobile phones.
Every time you speak to someone at a company you are potentially taking time away from someone else who wants to speak to them.
This analogy fails because someone with a genuine problem is getting genuine help. You're effectively DOSing Apple support channels for a couple days. By your argument, a DOS attack on Yahoo is no different from a search request because both take Yahoo's resources away from my search request.
What you're doing here is a petite version of burning the village in order to save it.
Hanging out in club Fed for a couple years for sending spam is easy. Being an escaped fugitive isn't, and if they catch him again, he'll probably get a larger sentence for escaping than for spamming, and be sent to a medium or high security prison.
As a fellow egotripper with a BA in philosophy, I'll agree that logic and argumentation can trump a degree. But as Wikipedia aptly demonstrates, in order for dialogue to arrive at the best, neutral information, the participants have to be 1) logical, and 2) knowledgeable. Wikipedia fails repeatedly on any contentious topic because participation is a sufficient credential, where expertise really would make a difference.
Do you think that Mars offers a good model of how Earth should behave in environmental terms? It's much smaller, has a tenth the atmosphere, and is much further from the sun. Obviously we can look at Mars and extrapolate to what should be happening on Earth, right?
The right to remain silent is the right to not be forced to say something that will incriminate yourself. Revealing the password does not, in itself, incriminate him (since it's normal that he would know it), so he can be compelled to reveal it (meaning contempt of court if a judge orders him to reveal it and he doesn't, which can mean up to five years in jail).
Even the right to remain silent is not absolute. If the government guarantees immunity from what you would reveal that would incriminate you, then you can be compelled to reveal it.
You mean 'according to the ridiculously overblown interpretation of conspiracy nuts and politicians looking to create a scandal where none exists.'
First, Pelosi isn't mentioned in the source material at all. Second, the source material mentions updates to existing rules to accommodate new technology, not new regulations. Third, the updates cover official House of Representatives communications (i.e., the House as an organization), not the communications of individual Congressman.
Reading your response, I understand how pernicious memes like "the liberal media" become powerful without any basis in reality.
Maybe, maybe not. Against the crime-of-passion angle is that Reiser was a successful programmer and businessman who was already divorced from Nina. He had a lot going for him, and when you look at someone like Reiser it's easy to think "of all the people I'd expect to be smarter and better adjusted and more able to deal with their problems without resorting to murder, this guy is at the top of the list."
In other words, for someone as capable as Reiser to murder his ex-wife seems especially cold-blooded, moreso when you look at his efforts to cover up the crime and then lie on the stand about it.
I dunno. Depends on what kind of day the judge is having, I suppose.
To be clear, he got 15-to-life. All he negotiated was the right to apply for parole ten years earlier than he otherwise would have. There's good odds he'll be in prison until he dies. Getting parole requires going before a parole board and convincing them that 1) you're sorry, and 2) you'll be no danger upon your release.
Since I doubt prison will improve Reiser's social skills, don't expect him to be paroled anytime soon after that minimum passes.
Parole boards virtually never grant parole to criminals who don't admit their guilt and show remorse. Trying to convince them that you were falsely convicted never works, so the absence of a body is no asset at all.
What it does do is eliminate the possibility of appeals (which was probably written into the plea agreement). But I've heard no reporting indicating that appeals were likely, either. Outside the tech community, this was a fairly standard murder, trial and conviction.
Her other boyfriend was a known murderer. That puts a lot of reasonable doubt in my mind.
The jury never heard about Sturgeon because the police (correctly) concluded that he was a nutcase confessing for attention (a syndrome not unknown to the police). Sturgeon said he killed eight people, but provided no evidence that he'd actually done it. He also didn't confess to eight known murders and go to jail for them. He just wanted some face time with the cops.
Look at it this way. I kill someone, get arrested, go to trial. You tell the police that you killed eight people, but not the one I'm accused of, whom you knew. The jury is told about your confession, has reasonable doubt, and acquits. The police have no evidence you actually killed anyone, so you can't be tried for the murder. Later, you and I have a beer together.
I still do not believe that premeditated murder has been proved. What evidence has been presented that he planned the killing at all?
Premeditation has a fairly wide meaning beyond the classic example of me decided to kill you and carefully planning it for days or weeks. It can count as premeditation if I decide to kill you seconds before doing so. What really matters is a clear, prior intention to bring about your death.
He duped no one. You all duped yourselves. I'm sympathetic--I understand what it's like to believe something because you want to believe it. But the whole./ side of this story is like a cautionary tale against wishful thinking.
Stop right there. There is no such thing as "making X kill Y". Reiser always had other options than murder, and phrasing it as "she made him do it to her" is blaming the victim for the actions of a murderer.
So let's lay off the fire and brimstone, what do you say?
No, let's not lay off. Vast numbers of other people extricate themselves from fucked up situations like Reiser's without resorting to murder. Vast numbers of people don't get into fucked up situations like Reiser's because they see problems developing and deal with them rather than hiding behind a geek badge that reads "proud to be aspie". Vast numbers of people suffer through their problems and don't brutally murder someone, hide their body, maintain their innocence in court, and then use their knowledge of their crime to get a reduced sentence for something they're totally, 100% guilty of.
I don't want to sound like I'm defending murder here
Or is just giving the closure to the family somehow outweighing him being in jail longer?
Basically, yes. Sucks that they had to reduce his sentence to give the family closure, but in the end I think it was worth it to do so. The absence of a body and the lingering doubt about her death would only compound the pain he caused them in the first place.
You've got it wrong. Windows is like the Star Trek movies: every *other one* sucks. 3.0 was awful, 3.1 fixed it up. 95, once you got past the ooh wow it's like a Mac now, sucked; 98 SE was pretty decent. ME blew syphilitic goats. NT 4.0 was a wreck; 4.5 made it right. 2000 had some serious flaws when it came out, but XP was actually decent. Installing vista is like being escorted into the maximum security wing of a prison wearing assless pants. Windows 7...
Well, we can hope. I might see the next Star Trek movie, too, if it's based on DS9.
Hilary Putnam, a fairly significant 20th century philosopher, wrote a paper ("Are Robots Conscious"?) essentially arguing Turing's line--that if a robot could pass as human, it was proper for us to treat it as we would a human, meaning with the same rights and dignity. Paul Ziff wrote a paper in response that I think captures a significant problem with the Turing Test.
Imagine that your neighbor plants a flower, and all summer you watch it grow. At the end of the summer you mention that you'd like to get one, and he winks at you and says "come here". He takes you to the flower and invites a close inspection, at which point you notice that it has a little access panel in the stem. Opening it, you see gears and rods. Looking closer at the rest of the flower, you see that it's entirely mechanical.
Now, following Turing, we should say that functionally, it's no different than a flower; that what counts as being a flower is the fact that it fooled us, and now the definition of 'flowerhood' has been expanded. But intuitively, we don't think that a new kind of flower is in front of us. We think, "wow, what an amazing mechanism." That it fooled us doesn't stop us from immediately demoting it from being a flower; we just acknowledge that our original perception was simply wrong because we now recognize that this thing is fundamentally different in kind from the canonical 'flower'.
Ziff's argument has stuck with me because everything I see about A.I. (and I've studied quite a bit of it) rings true in this way. We keep coming up with better algorithms for various things. We call them 'learning algorithms', or genetic, or whatnot. In the end, what we have are better algorithms, or rather better results from algorithms, because of cleverer logic. Nothing seen so far at all implies that we're on the path towards something similar to what's going on in our heads. Turing's response would be that consciousness just is that thing that is perceived by others as consciousness, and nothing more, but this ignores vast strides in neuroscience since then that correlate conscious activity with material brain states.
And if one day a chat bot fools us, so what? You're surprised that people are fooled by clever illusions?
Isn't the event horizon a relative distance from the center of the black hole, depending upon your velocity? The classic definition of an event horizon is that distance at which even light can't escape it, meaning something traveling at the speed of light.
To put it another way: to escape the pull of a black hole, you have to travel away from it at a speed greater than the speed at which gravity pulls you into it. Light having the fastest speed possible defines the absolute event horizon, but for something going slower the even horizon is further out. At 0.5c, the event horizon would be, well, not twice as far out, since the strength of gravity is the inverse of the square of the distance, but still further out.
Is that correct? I'm not disputing what you say about replacing the sun with a black hole of the same mass--which means the same gravitational influence.
These prisoners already have legal protections as enemy combatants under military trial as required by the court itself, legislated by Congress, and signed by the President.
No, they didn't. That's the point of the court's ruling, that the Military Commissions Act was effectively no legal protections at all. A kangaroo court was revealed for what it was.
The constitution does not specify which individuals have the enumerated rights, it specifies what the U.S. government may not do. And the constitution is clear by referring to persons in general, not U.S. citizens, as individuals whom the U.S. government may not treat in certain ways.
Wanting to win and winning are two different things. Do you honestly feel like we're winning? Do you really think Iraq and Gitmo are winning strategies? Do you feel safer now than you did in 2002?
If you look at my other responses in this thread, you'll see that I have no problem having respectful disagreements with others, and engaging them without abuse. You, on the other hand, began with calling what others have been arguing "pure crap", repeated a frequently debunked talking point about the second law of thermodynamics, and followed up with a plea for everyone to be less dogmatic, when you really mean that it's evolutionists who are too dogmatic to accept your creationist account. That's called 'poisoning the well'--any response that contradicts yours starts under the label 'dogmatism' rather than 'science'.
As our exchange has continued, you've called me close-minded twice, because I've called bullshit on your rhetorical tactics that slant the exchange in your favor. You have no idea how closed or open-minded I am (though a little research on your part would have demonstrated that I'm happy to engage another's ideas on their content, even if I disagree), but this is another tactic to make the debate about my apparent dogmatism, rather than the tired objections you mention.
The fact that I don't engage *you* respectfully says something about you, not me.
The fact that you genuinely believe that horseshit makes it no less dishonest to repeat it. Yes, I attack you personally, just as I would personally attack a white supremacist, or a holocaust denier, or a flat earther.
At a certain point, ignorance in the face of voluminous correct information becomes willful, and should be met with contempt. I can respect Behe's attempts to scientifically challenge evolution, to a degree, because he accepts fundamental preconditions of the dialogue that allow for the question to be resolved. You just repeat canards that are in circulation by people who refuse to educate themselves.
You're still relying on a meaningless number, 31,500, in your calculation. It's not that that number is a fluke--any number is going to be a fluke, whether it's 100 or 1,000,000. A mutation is a mutation. Which generation the mutation (and the corresponding environmental benefit) occurs in is like trying to correlate which lottery ticket wins by order of sale.
As for proving or disproving evolution, this doesn't "prove" evolution, it simply falsifies one Creationist objection, namely that evolution has never been observed in a lab. In fact, it has been observed in labs before this, and written up scientifically as early as 1992, but that's beside the point. Creationists say that evolution hasn't been observed, and now it has.
The proof of evolution is in the mountains of evidence, direct and indirect, that have been accumulated over the centuries, and that are adequately (and only) explained by the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is on as solid a scientific footing as the theory of gravity and the theory of a heliocentric solar system.
Your reply would have more force if there weren't so many complaints about patches submitted going unreviewed for months, if ever; if there weren't many more bugs than could be fixed for each release; if the releases weren't slipping for lack of time on the part of a very small core team.
The essential problem with X.org is that the core team is small and very highly skilled and experience with the code. There's a barrier to casual contribution that prevents a helpful community of lesser contributors from forming around it.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft had the physical presence and quality support that Apple offers, ./ might not feel so unkindly towards them.
A lot of the pro-Apple feeling comes from the fact that Apple offers good service and support. Within the limits of being a for-profit capitalist entity, their whole business model and attitude is far friendlier to the consumer than Microsoft's.
But that's the point, says the FSF! They're deeply hostile to consumers because they use DRM on their iPhone!
So what? I don't like DRM, so I don't buy an iPhone. It's not like Apple is forcing one on me, or using monopoly powers to spread their DRM to all mobile phones.
This analogy fails because someone with a genuine problem is getting genuine help. You're effectively DOSing Apple support channels for a couple days. By your argument, a DOS attack on Yahoo is no different from a search request because both take Yahoo's resources away from my search request.
What you're doing here is a petite version of burning the village in order to save it.
Hanging out in club Fed for a couple years for sending spam is easy. Being an escaped fugitive isn't, and if they catch him again, he'll probably get a larger sentence for escaping than for spamming, and be sent to a medium or high security prison.
Ask the editors of Conservapedia whether it's a problem.
As a fellow egotripper with a BA in philosophy, I'll agree that logic and argumentation can trump a degree. But as Wikipedia aptly demonstrates, in order for dialogue to arrive at the best, neutral information, the participants have to be 1) logical, and 2) knowledgeable. Wikipedia fails repeatedly on any contentious topic because participation is a sufficient credential, where expertise really would make a difference.
Do you think that Mars offers a good model of how Earth should behave in environmental terms? It's much smaller, has a tenth the atmosphere, and is much further from the sun. Obviously we can look at Mars and extrapolate to what should be happening on Earth, right?
The right to remain silent is the right to not be forced to say something that will incriminate yourself. Revealing the password does not, in itself, incriminate him (since it's normal that he would know it), so he can be compelled to reveal it (meaning contempt of court if a judge orders him to reveal it and he doesn't, which can mean up to five years in jail).
Even the right to remain silent is not absolute. If the government guarantees immunity from what you would reveal that would incriminate you, then you can be compelled to reveal it.
You mean 'according to the ridiculously overblown interpretation of conspiracy nuts and politicians looking to create a scandal where none exists.'
First, Pelosi isn't mentioned in the source material at all. Second, the source material mentions updates to existing rules to accommodate new technology, not new regulations. Third, the updates cover official House of Representatives communications (i.e., the House as an organization), not the communications of individual Congressman.
Reading your response, I understand how pernicious memes like "the liberal media" become powerful without any basis in reality.
Maybe, maybe not. Against the crime-of-passion angle is that Reiser was a successful programmer and businessman who was already divorced from Nina. He had a lot going for him, and when you look at someone like Reiser it's easy to think "of all the people I'd expect to be smarter and better adjusted and more able to deal with their problems without resorting to murder, this guy is at the top of the list."
In other words, for someone as capable as Reiser to murder his ex-wife seems especially cold-blooded, moreso when you look at his efforts to cover up the crime and then lie on the stand about it.
I dunno. Depends on what kind of day the judge is having, I suppose.
To be clear, he got 15-to-life. All he negotiated was the right to apply for parole ten years earlier than he otherwise would have. There's good odds he'll be in prison until he dies. Getting parole requires going before a parole board and convincing them that 1) you're sorry, and 2) you'll be no danger upon your release.
Since I doubt prison will improve Reiser's social skills, don't expect him to be paroled anytime soon after that minimum passes.
Parole boards virtually never grant parole to criminals who don't admit their guilt and show remorse. Trying to convince them that you were falsely convicted never works, so the absence of a body is no asset at all.
What it does do is eliminate the possibility of appeals (which was probably written into the plea agreement). But I've heard no reporting indicating that appeals were likely, either. Outside the tech community, this was a fairly standard murder, trial and conviction.
The jury never heard about Sturgeon because the police (correctly) concluded that he was a nutcase confessing for attention (a syndrome not unknown to the police). Sturgeon said he killed eight people, but provided no evidence that he'd actually done it. He also didn't confess to eight known murders and go to jail for them. He just wanted some face time with the cops.
Look at it this way. I kill someone, get arrested, go to trial. You tell the police that you killed eight people, but not the one I'm accused of, whom you knew. The jury is told about your confession, has reasonable doubt, and acquits. The police have no evidence you actually killed anyone, so you can't be tried for the murder. Later, you and I have a beer together.
Premeditation has a fairly wide meaning beyond the classic example of me decided to kill you and carefully planning it for days or weeks. It can count as premeditation if I decide to kill you seconds before doing so. What really matters is a clear, prior intention to bring about your death.
He duped no one. You all duped yourselves. I'm sympathetic--I understand what it's like to believe something because you want to believe it. But the whole ./ side of this story is like a cautionary tale against wishful thinking.
Stop right there. There is no such thing as "making X kill Y". Reiser always had other options than murder, and phrasing it as "she made him do it to her" is blaming the victim for the actions of a murderer.
No, let's not lay off. Vast numbers of other people extricate themselves from fucked up situations like Reiser's without resorting to murder. Vast numbers of people don't get into fucked up situations like Reiser's because they see problems developing and deal with them rather than hiding behind a geek badge that reads "proud to be aspie". Vast numbers of people suffer through their problems and don't brutally murder someone, hide their body, maintain their innocence in court, and then use their knowledge of their crime to get a reduced sentence for something they're totally, 100% guilty of.
Well, you do.
Basically, yes. Sucks that they had to reduce his sentence to give the family closure, but in the end I think it was worth it to do so. The absence of a body and the lingering doubt about her death would only compound the pain he caused them in the first place.
You've got it wrong. Windows is like the Star Trek movies: every *other one* sucks. 3.0 was awful, 3.1 fixed it up. 95, once you got past the ooh wow it's like a Mac now, sucked; 98 SE was pretty decent. ME blew syphilitic goats. NT 4.0 was a wreck; 4.5 made it right. 2000 had some serious flaws when it came out, but XP was actually decent. Installing vista is like being escorted into the maximum security wing of a prison wearing assless pants. Windows 7...
Well, we can hope. I might see the next Star Trek movie, too, if it's based on DS9.
Hilary Putnam, a fairly significant 20th century philosopher, wrote a paper ("Are Robots Conscious"?) essentially arguing Turing's line--that if a robot could pass as human, it was proper for us to treat it as we would a human, meaning with the same rights and dignity. Paul Ziff wrote a paper in response that I think captures a significant problem with the Turing Test.
Imagine that your neighbor plants a flower, and all summer you watch it grow. At the end of the summer you mention that you'd like to get one, and he winks at you and says "come here". He takes you to the flower and invites a close inspection, at which point you notice that it has a little access panel in the stem. Opening it, you see gears and rods. Looking closer at the rest of the flower, you see that it's entirely mechanical.
Now, following Turing, we should say that functionally, it's no different than a flower; that what counts as being a flower is the fact that it fooled us, and now the definition of 'flowerhood' has been expanded. But intuitively, we don't think that a new kind of flower is in front of us. We think, "wow, what an amazing mechanism." That it fooled us doesn't stop us from immediately demoting it from being a flower; we just acknowledge that our original perception was simply wrong because we now recognize that this thing is fundamentally different in kind from the canonical 'flower'.
Ziff's argument has stuck with me because everything I see about A.I. (and I've studied quite a bit of it) rings true in this way. We keep coming up with better algorithms for various things. We call them 'learning algorithms', or genetic, or whatnot. In the end, what we have are better algorithms, or rather better results from algorithms, because of cleverer logic. Nothing seen so far at all implies that we're on the path towards something similar to what's going on in our heads. Turing's response would be that consciousness just is that thing that is perceived by others as consciousness, and nothing more, but this ignores vast strides in neuroscience since then that correlate conscious activity with material brain states.
And if one day a chat bot fools us, so what? You're surprised that people are fooled by clever illusions?
Isn't the event horizon a relative distance from the center of the black hole, depending upon your velocity? The classic definition of an event horizon is that distance at which even light can't escape it, meaning something traveling at the speed of light.
To put it another way: to escape the pull of a black hole, you have to travel away from it at a speed greater than the speed at which gravity pulls you into it. Light having the fastest speed possible defines the absolute event horizon, but for something going slower the even horizon is further out. At 0.5c, the event horizon would be, well, not twice as far out, since the strength of gravity is the inverse of the square of the distance, but still further out.
Is that correct? I'm not disputing what you say about replacing the sun with a black hole of the same mass--which means the same gravitational influence.
No, they didn't. That's the point of the court's ruling, that the Military Commissions Act was effectively no legal protections at all. A kangaroo court was revealed for what it was.
Wrong.
The constitution does not specify which individuals have the enumerated rights, it specifies what the U.S. government may not do. And the constitution is clear by referring to persons in general, not U.S. citizens, as individuals whom the U.S. government may not treat in certain ways.
Wanting to win and winning are two different things. Do you honestly feel like we're winning? Do you really think Iraq and Gitmo are winning strategies? Do you feel safer now than you did in 2002?
If you look at my other responses in this thread, you'll see that I have no problem having respectful disagreements with others, and engaging them without abuse. You, on the other hand, began with calling what others have been arguing "pure crap", repeated a frequently debunked talking point about the second law of thermodynamics, and followed up with a plea for everyone to be less dogmatic, when you really mean that it's evolutionists who are too dogmatic to accept your creationist account. That's called 'poisoning the well'--any response that contradicts yours starts under the label 'dogmatism' rather than 'science'.
As our exchange has continued, you've called me close-minded twice, because I've called bullshit on your rhetorical tactics that slant the exchange in your favor. You have no idea how closed or open-minded I am (though a little research on your part would have demonstrated that I'm happy to engage another's ideas on their content, even if I disagree), but this is another tactic to make the debate about my apparent dogmatism, rather than the tired objections you mention.
The fact that I don't engage *you* respectfully says something about you, not me.
The fact that you genuinely believe that horseshit makes it no less dishonest to repeat it. Yes, I attack you personally, just as I would personally attack a white supremacist, or a holocaust denier, or a flat earther.
At a certain point, ignorance in the face of voluminous correct information becomes willful, and should be met with contempt. I can respect Behe's attempts to scientifically challenge evolution, to a degree, because he accepts fundamental preconditions of the dialogue that allow for the question to be resolved. You just repeat canards that are in circulation by people who refuse to educate themselves.
You're still relying on a meaningless number, 31,500, in your calculation. It's not that that number is a fluke--any number is going to be a fluke, whether it's 100 or 1,000,000. A mutation is a mutation. Which generation the mutation (and the corresponding environmental benefit) occurs in is like trying to correlate which lottery ticket wins by order of sale.
As for proving or disproving evolution, this doesn't "prove" evolution, it simply falsifies one Creationist objection, namely that evolution has never been observed in a lab. In fact, it has been observed in labs before this, and written up scientifically as early as 1992, but that's beside the point. Creationists say that evolution hasn't been observed, and now it has.
The proof of evolution is in the mountains of evidence, direct and indirect, that have been accumulated over the centuries, and that are adequately (and only) explained by the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution is on as solid a scientific footing as the theory of gravity and the theory of a heliocentric solar system.
Your reply would have more force if there weren't so many complaints about patches submitted going unreviewed for months, if ever; if there weren't many more bugs than could be fixed for each release; if the releases weren't slipping for lack of time on the part of a very small core team.
The essential problem with X.org is that the core team is small and very highly skilled and experience with the code. There's a barrier to casual contribution that prevents a helpful community of lesser contributors from forming around it.