The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers
Bullshit. By your logic, people who downloaded and viewed Collateral Damage provided validation and acceptance of the producers: the armed forces, and so endorsed targeted killing of civilians and of people who came to aid the wounded.
Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbours; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases. In over one-third of cases, the perpetrator is also a minor. ~wikipedia
Stop equating visual representation of child abuse with child abuse: you are helping the actual child abusers by keeping them out of sights. Thanks to people like you, the public thinks that sexual child abuse is a fringe activity of ultra-perverts in child-porn rings. But this is nuts. Most child abusers do not give two shits about child porn, and they certainly don't make it. Most children are abused by people who know them personally and have unrestricted access, and that is true everywhere in the world, including places like rural Mongolia, where pornography is non-existent. Why would a child abuser need pornography when there is a naked kid running right if front of him all day?
I am firmly against commercializing child porn, and I don't want to look at it either. But I believe just as firmly that the images themselves need to me made legal to possess and to share in a non-commercial setting. May be then the public will realize that child abuse is not a Grimm fairy tale, but something really ugly and commonplace.
Really, who gives a flying fuck. Statistically speaking, whatever scandalous things kids do when they hang out together without adult supervision will absolutely dwarf whatever they find on the Internet. Filtering Internet porn for the sake of kids is retarded: they all already have access to pictures and videos of naked kids in their own school or neighborhood doing whatever. Some of them are semiprofessional porn producers. They also revel in using the nastiest, juiciest profanities. Now I barely swear at all beyond expletives when falling on my face or alone, doing math or coding. When I was in grade school, plenty of people were swearing just for the sake of swearing. Swearing and fucking. This particular aspect of the US culture others find hard to understand: kids obviously have a lot of sex, but they are not allowed near the naughty art.
To solve the problem at hand, it is entirely sufficient to use end-to-end encryption, either public key or symmetric, it really doesn't matter. A decentralized solution without such encryption would only be slower without offering anything in terms of privacy. Those of us who use GPG with email are already reaping the rewards of secure communications, even as we assume that copies of our communications are made and kept for many years by many different parties.
Correct me, but it looks like Victor's machine is set one way or the other (to entangle or not) before the photons are emitted, and the cable is pretty short, so may be the photons see ahead and the very creation of the entangled pairs is affected by this setting (if this sounds like gibberish, it's because IANAP). I agree with you: either make the cable much longer, or make sure that Victor decides (and calibrates the equipment) after the photons are already on the way.
Because it's a highly sophisticated and polished pile of dung, and the so-called 'creative' class is just as brainwashed by ads as any other class in USA.
Macs still Just Work. That's because it's Unix with a fancy hat on.
I used to have a Mac, and I know from a deeply personal experience that Mac is more like UNIX with a ball-gag on and its hands tied behind its back. It is the best platform if all you want is to get reamed by Zombie Steve.
So an exact solution does not exist, big deal. There are plenty of things we can calculate numerically with precision which is high in practice and arbitrary in theory.
There should be many alternative textbooks on the same subject, and they should be reviewed all the time, so it's more expensive than you make it look, but you are right about the main thing: maintaining libre textbooks with grants will still be much cheaper than buying anything proprietary.
While it is true that every finite sequence will appear in a normal number, the normality is actually much stronger. Normality (in some base) implies that every finite sequence appears infinitely many times, and the ratio of its appearances to that of all strings of the same length tends to the "fair" ratio 1/(base^length), as long as we consider larger and larger initial segments of the expansion.
I used to think WindowMaker to be the best WM, but after it started to feel dated I looked around and finally switched to openbox (another WM inspired by Blackbox). I feel like it took WindowMaker's philosophy even further: it complies withstandards and it got rid of a bunch of non-essential features like background setting, quick-launch buttons, dock, and most of the GUI wizardry.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
By (1), non-commercial exchange of ANY information that is artistic or scientific in nature is a human right. Lending a book to a friend is a selfless act of sharing, just like uploading files to consenting strangers via BT from your home Internet connection. By (2), authors should have legal means to enforce proper credits and to get compensated when their works are shared commercially. Note that only authors are eligible, so there is no mandate for a transferable copyright. There is no mandate for a corporate-controlled copyright, as these are Human rights. Actually, there is no mandate for any kind of copyright, for as long as there is some kind of scheme for reimbursing authors, their human rights are protected.
The only contradiction is between the current copyright law and the UDHR: non-commercial sharing is considered infringing in many jurisdictions, but the law itself infringes on our Human right 27.1. If I and some other dude agree to share files we already have, and without exchanging any money, then we are clearly "participating in the cultural life of the community", "enjoying the arts", and nothing else, and should be able to do so freely. But if one party makes money in this transaction, then the act of making money is neither "participating" nor "enjoying", and can (but does not have to) be regulated by a copyright law.
IMHO, Sun worship and cat worship are some of the most sane and non-superstitious religions in existence (and ancient Egyptians did both). Unlike in many other religions, the deities are real and their immense powers over humans are apparent to all. Cats in particular have never done as well as today, and their star seems to be still rising. They don't do absolutely anything but look cute, and they are set for life with food, healthcare, and entertainment. Wild populations are often tolerated, giving them even more options.
I agree about the student/teacher ratio. Spending 4 hours per week with a private tutor is vastly more productive than sharing the same instructor with 20 other students the same 4 hours per week.
The statistics influenced by test scores are totally bogus though. If the tests are not standard, then comparing scores with other schools is meaningless.
OTOH, if the tests are standard, then it's a crappy school, period, since it forces kids to study test-taking and not much else. A good test is not standard, but has a huge element of surprise and is tailored to its audience. Only then we can claim that we've tested the student's knowledge of the subject. If one school has higher standard test scores (or their derivative) than the other school, all it tells us is that the first school has better test-related drills. You can also make predictions about students' grades. If you are like me, though, trying to pick the school with the best overall education experience, then none of this is useful. The education may be better or worse or the same.
My plan for choosing a good school involves getting off my ass and visiting the school, where I can talk to teachers, parents, and kids.
The problem with PGP/signed-emails is that you're putting the burden on the user.
How? All these clowns want is for the user to be able to recognize the bank. The bank recognizes the
user by password, so as long as the user isn't giving out the password to phishers, the account is secure.
The only "hard" part of using GPG with email is maintaining your own identity, but here it's not needed.
They just have to make their clients display S/MIME and PGP/MIME and then distribute in a secure way
a list of public keys of all their buddies.
But companies like Microsoft want a lot more pie than that. They get paid a lot more if they reinvent this
wheel badly and then patent it. And make it impossible to authenticate with free software, even though there is
no technical reason for that.
Internet is but a passing technology. It shouldn't be a right any more than other communication tools such as megaphones or banners. Your rights to free expression and association should be sufficient to allow you to use Internet in productive ways, for politics as well as for business. This is not to say that we cannot demand a state to provide us with cheap and neutral Internet access, but this would just be pragmatism, not an ethical imperative. States should subsidize Internet just like they subsidize other critical aspects of the society: roads and other means of transportation, energy production, general health. And they should do it just in case if the end results are better (cheaper, more fair) than what we would have in a pure capitalist utopia. As indeed they are.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact others download and view the material provide validation and acceptance to the producers
Bullshit. By your logic, people who downloaded and viewed Collateral Damage provided validation and acceptance of the producers: the armed forces, and so endorsed targeted killing of civilians and of people who came to aid the wounded.
Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, mothers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbours; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases. In over one-third of cases, the perpetrator is also a minor. ~wikipedia
Stop equating visual representation of child abuse with child abuse: you are helping the actual child abusers by keeping them out of sights. Thanks to people like you, the public thinks that sexual child abuse is a fringe activity of ultra-perverts in child-porn rings. But this is nuts. Most child abusers do not give two shits about child porn, and they certainly don't make it. Most children are abused by people who know them personally and have unrestricted access, and that is true everywhere in the world, including places like rural Mongolia, where pornography is non-existent. Why would a child abuser need pornography when there is a naked kid running right if front of him all day?
I am firmly against commercializing child porn, and I don't want to look at it either. But I believe just as firmly that the images themselves need to me made legal to possess and to share in a non-commercial setting. May be then the public will realize that child abuse is not a Grimm fairy tale, but something really ugly and commonplace.
You've made my thread :)
Really, who gives a flying fuck. Statistically speaking, whatever scandalous things kids do when they hang out together without adult supervision will absolutely dwarf whatever they find on the Internet. Filtering Internet porn for the sake of kids is retarded: they all already have access to pictures and videos of naked kids in their own school or neighborhood doing whatever. Some of them are semiprofessional porn producers. They also revel in using the nastiest, juiciest profanities. Now I barely swear at all beyond expletives when falling on my face or alone, doing math or coding. When I was in grade school, plenty of people were swearing just for the sake of swearing. Swearing and fucking. This particular aspect of the US culture others find hard to understand: kids obviously have a lot of sex, but they are not allowed near the naughty art.
To solve the problem at hand, it is entirely sufficient to use end-to-end encryption, either public key or symmetric, it really doesn't matter. A decentralized solution without such encryption would only be slower without offering anything in terms of privacy. Those of us who use GPG with email are already reaping the rewards of secure communications, even as we assume that copies of our communications are made and kept for many years by many different parties.
If they wanted to make a product that doesn't suck, they'd make a vacuum cleaner.
IMHO, ZFC has only two nutty axioms: Infinity and Foundation. The rest are intuitive both individually and as a group.
Correct me, but it looks like Victor's machine is set one way or the other (to entangle or not) before the photons are emitted, and the cable is pretty short, so may be the photons see ahead and the very creation of the entangled pairs is affected by this setting (if this sounds like gibberish, it's because IANAP). I agree with you: either make the cable much longer, or make sure that Victor decides (and calibrates the equipment) after the photons are already on the way.
When I grow up, I want to go to bovine university!
Because it's a highly sophisticated and polished pile of dung, and the so-called 'creative' class is just as brainwashed by ads as any other class in USA.
Macs still Just Work. That's because it's Unix with a fancy hat on.
I used to have a Mac, and I know from a deeply personal experience that Mac is more like UNIX with a ball-gag on and its hands tied behind its back. It is the best platform if all you want is to get reamed by Zombie Steve.
So an exact solution does not exist, big deal. There are plenty of things we can calculate numerically with precision which is high in practice and arbitrary in theory.
There should be many alternative textbooks on the same subject, and they should be reviewed all the time, so it's more expensive than you make it look, but you are right about the main thing: maintaining libre textbooks with grants will still be much cheaper than buying anything proprietary.
Unless I know that I am contributing to a libre project, I always use "fuck" in reCAPTCHA.
While it is true that every finite sequence will appear in a normal number, the normality is actually much stronger. Normality (in some base) implies that every finite sequence appears infinitely many times, and the ratio of its appearances to that of all strings of the same length tends to the "fair" ratio 1/(base^length), as long as we consider larger and larger initial segments of the expansion.
% Real men use Postscript
/w exch def
/draw_square { 1 dict begin
gsave
newpath 0 0 moveto
3 {
w 0 rlineto
90 rotate
} repeat
closepath stroke
grestore
end } def
100 draw_square
This face is not bold.
Indeed. The actual source has about 955 characters, which is not that impressive for a game so gimped.
I used to think WindowMaker to be the best WM, but after it started to feel dated I looked around and finally switched to openbox (another WM inspired by Blackbox). I feel like it took WindowMaker's philosophy even further: it complies with standards and it got rid of a bunch of non-essential features like background setting, quick-launch buttons, dock, and most of the GUI wizardry.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
By (1), non-commercial exchange of ANY information that is artistic or scientific in nature is a human right. Lending a book to a friend is a selfless act of sharing, just like uploading files to consenting strangers via BT from your home Internet connection. By (2), authors should have legal means to enforce proper credits and to get compensated when their works are shared commercially. Note that only authors are eligible, so there is no mandate for a transferable copyright. There is no mandate for a corporate-controlled copyright, as these are Human rights. Actually, there is no mandate for any kind of copyright, for as long as there is some kind of scheme for reimbursing authors, their human rights are protected.
The only contradiction is between the current copyright law and the UDHR: non-commercial sharing is considered infringing in many jurisdictions, but the law itself infringes on our Human right 27.1. If I and some other dude agree to share files we already have, and without exchanging any money, then we are clearly "participating in the cultural life of the community", "enjoying the arts", and nothing else, and should be able to do so freely. But if one party makes money in this transaction, then the act of making money is neither "participating" nor "enjoying", and can (but does not have to) be regulated by a copyright law.
IMHO, Sun worship and cat worship are some of the most sane and non-superstitious religions in existence (and ancient Egyptians did both). Unlike in many other religions, the deities are real and their immense powers over humans are apparent to all. Cats in particular have never done as well as today, and their star seems to be still rising. They don't do absolutely anything but look cute, and they are set for life with food, healthcare, and entertainment. Wild populations are often tolerated, giving them even more options.
I agree about the student/teacher ratio. Spending 4 hours per week with a private tutor is vastly more productive than sharing the same instructor with 20 other students the same 4 hours per week.
The statistics influenced by test scores are totally bogus though. If the tests are not standard, then comparing scores with other schools is meaningless. OTOH, if the tests are standard, then it's a crappy school, period, since it forces kids to study test-taking and not much else. A good test is not standard, but has a huge element of surprise and is tailored to its audience. Only then we can claim that we've tested the student's knowledge of the subject. If one school has higher standard test scores (or their derivative) than the other school, all it tells us is that the first school has better test-related drills. You can also make predictions about students' grades. If you are like me, though, trying to pick the school with the best overall education experience, then none of this is useful. The education may be better or worse or the same.
My plan for choosing a good school involves getting off my ass and visiting the school, where I can talk to teachers, parents, and kids.
I can't believe they are still alive.
The problem with PGP/signed-emails is that you're putting the burden on the user.
How? All these clowns want is for the user to be able to recognize the bank. The bank recognizes the user by password, so as long as the user isn't giving out the password to phishers, the account is secure. The only "hard" part of using GPG with email is maintaining your own identity, but here it's not needed. They just have to make their clients display S/MIME and PGP/MIME and then distribute in a secure way a list of public keys of all their buddies.
But companies like Microsoft want a lot more pie than that. They get paid a lot more if they reinvent this wheel badly and then patent it. And make it impossible to authenticate with free software, even though there is no technical reason for that.
So to quote Mod Flanders, "Will someone please think of the children!"
Helen Lovejoy, Moe once. I don't think Maude ever said that.
Internet is but a passing technology. It shouldn't be a right any more than other communication tools such as megaphones or banners. Your rights to free expression and association should be sufficient to allow you to use Internet in productive ways, for politics as well as for business. This is not to say that we cannot demand a state to provide us with cheap and neutral Internet access, but this would just be pragmatism, not an ethical imperative. States should subsidize Internet just like they subsidize other critical aspects of the society: roads and other means of transportation, energy production, general health. And they should do it just in case if the end results are better (cheaper, more fair) than what we would have in a pure capitalist utopia. As indeed they are.