Because an entirely closed system would have reached a state of equilibrium after an infinite amount of time
Again, why? Certainly, it could be a cycle (Big Bang/Crunch cycle) as a kind of equilibrium, but why couldn't it also be something like pi? Equilibrium, but each moment is unique...
Secondly, thermodynamics absolutely *depends* on conservation of energy.
Simple machines, such as levers, pulleys, etc, pretty much depend on Newton's laws. Having a special case (relativity) in which those laws don't apply in no way implies that we can stop using Newtonian physics on a smaller scale. So having a special case in which conservation of energy (or matter) is not maintained in no way invalidates thermodynamics on the scale in which it is applied.
Anything that exists outside of this realm would be by definition "higher," or "super," in the strict definition of the word.
Then this has become a semantic argument, and not particularly interesting. Relativity and superconductivity are both "supernatural", by that definition.
What I dispute is that exceptions like Relativity are in any way mystical -- or, more generally, that even things we might consider mystical, if they exist, could never be explained by some new natural law. I'm basically arguing that everything that exists is going to follow recognizable patterns (whether or not we've seen them before).
You have the US, with its own laws, but those laws don't necessarily exist outside of the country. It's a terrible analogy, but it works. You have existence, it has its laws within it, but there's no logical reason to assume they exist outside of it.
It's an interesting choice of words -- you're implying that things like god might exist, so to speak, outside of existence. We have a word for things that don't exist -- nonexistent, or "fiction".
If you're arguing that there may well be another universe entirely, that's fine, but that falls into the realm of every other "could be" that you've put forth so far. There could be a teacup in space. It's even physically possible for there to be -- the thing could orbit fast enough, after all, and we can't prove no one snuck one up with a satellite launch. But is it really worth the effort to reason about a teacup in space? Would it be anything but ludicrous to start to worship the space-teacup?
I've probably used that analogy before -- strictly speaking, even if I was fanatically fundamentalist about the known laws of science, I would have to admit to being space-teacup-agnostic. But if you asked me whether there was a teacup up there, I'd probably say "Not that I know of", or just "No."
You like to use it, but pink unicorns and the FSM are *not* logical arguments. For a rumor not to die after thousands of years is something to consider.
For what it's worth, they absolutely are logical arguments -- it's called reductio ad absurdum.
So if Scientology is still around in a thousand years, will it become something you cannot discard as ludicrous? (Hint: I think Xenu is every bit as hilarious an example as the FSM.)
Jews believe pork is unclean -- not kosher. They believe that it's because God said so. In actuality (or so I remember reading), it's likely because of a certain disease -- worms or somesuch -- which could be found in pork at the time, making it a less safe food than things which were considered kosher.
Nowdays, of course, we know a bit more about food sanitation, so pork is probably safe. But Jews continue to refuse it.
A great metaphor for religion -- maybe it filled a needed role, at one point. Maybe the human brain is simply predisposed to religion, for completely unrelated needs -- I speculate that it may be simply the natural conclusion of our instinctive need for a father figure.
Oh, by the way: Racism is something which has existed for thousands of years. So has rape
Fair enough, but while it hasn't happened so much yet, I suspect that an effort will be made to have Mono's P/Invoke calls map to DLLs run through Wine.
Of course, the goal of Mono is to allow any cleanly portable.NET app to run without any need for Wine -- so WinForms is actually implemented in Mono.
But keep in mind, a cleanly portable.NET app means it will also run on non-x86 platforms. While there was initially some effort to do this with Wine (specifically Darwine), I think Apple's move to x86 killed it, and in any case, it would be emulation --.NET on non-x86 could be just as portable as Java. (Won't be, but could.)
A hundred fiddly little apps that all need special attention to run correctly under wine, and every one that craps itself makes you look like more and more of a jerkoff to your client. Simple solution: Look it up in AppDB. If it's listed with a good rating, tell your customer you can do that. Otherwise, explain that you can't, and that virtualization might be a better approach.
Keep in mind, Wine doesn't have to be able to perfectly run every Windows app. It only needs to be able to perfectly run the ones you (or your client) actually needs.
There's a cost difference with virtualization. There's also a difference in boot times (2-5 seconds with Wine vs a whole XP boot with virtualization), in performance (wrapped FS API is very likely faster than virtual hard disk on top of a real FS, for instance), and in RAM usage (duh).
Vista API technologies are not even on the radar, and have the potential to shake up the next generation of application development. (Search Channel9 on WPF.NET 3.5 SP1 for some interesting demos of how far WPF has already gone in just a year.) If WPF.NET is the future, Mono is already on that job -- and Mono can, in theory, be better than Wine, as.NET was at least half-assedly designed to be portable.
Keep in mind, also, that there's a whole class of people who only need one or two killer apps to work. Sometimes it's something recent (Photoshop); often it's something like an old version of QuickBooks, or some obscure app that no one makes anymore. So if Wine runs legacy apps well, that's a very good start.
Anyway its not gonna change any time soon i think Really depends how fast someone can get IPTV working. I think we need more projects like Sanctuary -- though that seems to have mysteriously evaporated / been bought.
It seems very likely, however, that the next generation of smartphones will be trying to steal features from the iPhone -- at the very least, I'd expect (relatively) high resolution, if not touch.
Satellite has to be encrypted because they broadcast everything all the time, over an entire country. If they don't encrypt it, people can receive it without paying, its a compromise. That's a reason why they do it, not why they have to. It's heavily ad-supported already -- seriously, they've got commercial breaks every five minutes, and every ten minutes or so, there's a small chunk of actual TV in which 25% of the screen is not taken up by an animated ad -- with audio!
I haven't looked at the economics of it, but it really does seem like satellite could operate on pretty much the same principles as over-the-air TV.
I value having the source for certain things simply because i can make use of it elsewhere, and i can see what its doing. I'm not as concerned about modifying software in place, though i realize other people value this greatly. I value both quite a lot.
I value being able to understand what's going on, and use it elsewhere, because of some good experiences with open source projects which were made to be hacked up. (In particular, Capistrano has close to no documentation, but very readable source. Before reading that source, I'd have dismissed it out of hand; after reading the source, I even sent in a patch, and it now does pretty much exactly what I want.)
I also value modifying the source in-place, due to something very similar to RMS' printer problem. I had an ATI video card, and I was trying to get it working on Linux. The problem was, this was Linux 2.4, which had no built-in AGP support, and straight PCI isn't fast enough -- so ATI had embedded AGP support in their drivers. And, thankfully, they'd separated generic stuff like this AGP code out into the open source chunk -- there was still a binary blob, but I didn't have to touch it.
So, for some strange reason, the video card was properly setup and always autodetected by the motherboard as AGP 3.0 (despite tweaking the BIOS, I couldn't change this), yet the ATI drivers saw it as AGP 2.0, or 2.5, or something, and refused to work.
So I opened up the source for those ATI drivers, commented out the autodetection code, and replaced it with the single line which set it to AGP 3.0. Were I to do this today, I might put some effort into figuring out how to enable this via an insmod (now modprobe) argument, but back then, I hardly had to know C to do this.
And it worked. Perfectly, beautifully.
So that is a concern for me -- especially something like a TiVo, which, more likely than not, isn't going to be setup perfectly for me. That, and the fact that not only can others develop patches and mods, but I can get those patches and mods without them having to go through TiVo for approval.
It's a completely different purpose, though. I'd argue that modifying in-place is mostly useful for that kind of brutal hack, whereas modifying and porting is more useful for building something new and interesting.
No, under that definition, opinions derived from experience are informed. Opinions derived from "because I want to believe" or "I just made this shit up" are faith. Most people's religious belief, in particular, boils down to something like that -- because I was told, and because I'd rather believe in Jesus than not, and because I read Pascal's Wager but not the FSM.
Unless you lack some faculty of the mind that they do not.... You have a confirmation bias towards the non-supernatural just as someone may have it the other way.
If the supernatural exists, it should be pretty obvious. I've been told, over and over (as I was growing up!) that people can fly -- that sufficiently enlightened humans can just take off and soar like Superman.
If I saw something like that, I wouldn't just write it off. I mean, yes, I'd check my own sanity. I'd perform some math in my head, I'd pinch myself, I'd pick up a book and try to read, and if at all possible, I'd seek out others to confirm the observation.
But there's a pretty good chance that I would rule out my own insanity and decide that I was wrong, and you were right.
Yet nothing like this has ever happened to me. The closest are blurry, unfocused and absurdly compressed YouTube videos of a man lighting some newspaper on fire with his mind -- in a way which seems very easy to fake.
nothing I say will change their mind.
Why are you trying to convince them otherwise anyway?
Where did I say I was? No, I won't try, because I know I won't get anywhere, and I won't even get a decent debate out of it.
If they're right, that means you're wrong. You failed to account for that possibility.
Giving all observations equal weight, I have never observed myself to be wrong about a supernatural experience. My observation of them relating their observations means that any evidence I do have is secondhand at best, and most likely entirely hearsay.
So yes, I accounted for it, and discarded it.
I've never seen a lot of things like quasars, solar eclipses, tornadoes, hurricanes, supernovae, great white sharks, etc. with my own eyes. I'm basing it solely on second-hand evidence.
However, in many of these cases, you can actually go and verify this yourself -- you can look at the photos taken, and the mathematics calculated, which show that quasars exist. You can look at the weather data...
Oh, and there are often hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have seen what evidence we have firsthand, especially in the case of things like tornadoes and hurricanes.
Yet you have not admitted to having a supernatural experience, you are only arguing for their possibility. So coming from you, and from everyone I know personally, and from everyone they know, I can count on one hand the number of people who have had supernatural experiences.
Again -- probably more people believe in Christ than have seen a tornado. But insanely more people have seen a tornado than have seen Christ.
That tends to be more agnostic than atheistic.
I thought about it for awhile. For a very long time, I called myself an "optimistic agnostic." Then I realized it was all weasel words, and that I just felt uncomfortable calling myself atheist.
I am agnostic in two fundamental ways: First, God is not a concept which could be known to be true or false. Any experience of God could as easily be an illusion, or an opium dream, or anything. By extension, if a god is real, it would have no way of proving itself. How do you prove omnipotence, anyway -- and that you're not just some lesser daemon who wouldn't have a chance against the real higher power?
Second, I think that Descartes had a good start -- correct translation is "I am aware, therefore I exist." That is about all we can know. Even math can only be known to the extent that we c
I think the iPhone would disagree there. Pretty much as long as Apple refuses to put Flash on the iPhone, anything iPhone-friendly will have to be some flavor of HTML. The fact that it would also work well on Linux is a bonus.
Why should I define "free will"? Because you were using it as an example of something I've supposedly experienced, which would be evidence of the supernatural.
My point is that a lot of people bash religion and still they themselves either refuse to answer the same questions themselves ("I don't know") Where does thunder come from?
One person might need to invent a story, about a great warrior in the sky, who had a magic hammer. Every time the hammer fell, it would make a sound of thunder.
Another might say, honestly, "I don't know."
Today, we know the answer -- massive amounts of static electricity, discharging in sparks so huge and hot that the very air expands fast enough to cause a pressure wave, which we hear as thunder.
The person who said "I don't know" gets to keep asking the question, and when the answer is finally found, they won't be wrong. The person who invented the crap about Thor would have stopped searching for the answer, and if they were around to see the answer, their entire Thor story would be shown as untrue.
"I don't know" is exactly the right answer -- we don't know. The difference is, you made up a story about a big bearded man in the sky, so that you wouldn't have to admit your own ignorance. I tell you up front that I don't know.
or run into the shadows of fighting about semantics ("define..."). If we don't share common semantics, how can we have a conversation about anything? I actually don't know what you mean by "free will" -- it sounds as though you mean something supernatural, in which case, you've got a circular argument.
Of course I can define free will the way in your last paragraph and it does not break down. Well, then I can define your "wants" in terms of simple stimulus/response, hormonal/chemical reactions, and so on. So that kind of free will could very well be deterministic, scientifically explained, and not supernatural at all.
If I do have a free will then my consciousness cannot be predetermined. Are you arguing that the converse is true?
The thing is, stuff like satellite television HAS to be encrypted Why?
That isn't the same sort of "we sold you this song but you can't do what you want with it". That is exactly the effect. We sold you access to this channel, but you can't do what you want with it.
at the basic level satellite HAS to be DRM'd to prevent service theft. It seems to me that it has pretty much the same amount of effectiveness as any other DRM, though. Which is, "None at all."
Thats why i believe TiVo is being so protective, and why i don't have as much of a problem with what they did. I don't like it, but i understand. I don't much care what they do -- so long as they write the software. If they use my software, they play by my rules.
You CAN still tinker with the software, you just can't run modified copies of that software on the hardware Or, in other words, you can't still tinker with the software. You can port it to different hardware, sure, but as it stands, you can't tinker with the software which is in that device -- which would very likely be the whole point to having the source code.
Think back to the RMS story, and imagine telling this to a pissed-off RMS: "Ok, you can have the source code to this printer driver, but you can't use it with our printer." In what way is that helpful?
Yes, it's better than nothing, but it misses the point.
You then argue about distribution of private adult pornography, specifically in relation to the Paris Hilton sex tape. My point was sex tapes in general -- don't the adults featured in these sex tapes have as much a right to privacy as the children (or teens) featured in child pornography?
In other words, I'm trying to divorce your argument of "right to privacy" from age, to see if it still holds up. Should we be able to effectively recall a sex tape, and make it illegal to possess it in any form?
All places in society are "monitored" by law enforcement, regardless of whether we're discussing bank robberies and protection rackets or criminal conspiracies to distribute what amounts to a child snuff-film. And Freenet is an effort to make the Internet no longer one of those places.
I dispute your false dichotomy of being forced to choose between either an "open, free internet" vs. a "closed, monitored, filtered internet" by these actions of the state and privately owned ISPs. Calling it a "false dichotomy" implies that it's possible to have an "open, free internet" which is also "closed, monitored, or filtered."
I'll admit there are degrees of that -- for instance, we could have an Internet which is filtered, but not monitored, or one which is monitored, but not filtered. I would prefer something more like Freenet -- an Internet which is pretty much untouchable.
There is a further argument: If anything can be censored on the Internet, that implies that we have given someone the ability to decide what is acceptable, and what is not. Right now, that might be a very valid metric of child pornography -- maybe next time, it will be websites which express opposing political views.
The easiest way to ensure that nothing you value will be censored is to ensure that nothing is censored.
I think the biggest problem with this debate is that the submitted write-up (and every write-up posted to slashdot this issue) has conflated the business interests of these ISPs (to reduce costs and limit unprofitable service) with the legal and appropriate action of censoring criminal child-pornography. Mainly because the ISP did that already. If they had said "We're dropping alt.* (or better yet, alt.binaries.*) to reduce bandwidth and storage costs," that would've been fine. Not great, especially for people who want to read alt.sysadmin.recovery or whatever, but it would make a lot more sense than what they have actually said, which is "We're dropping alt.* because there is child pornography in there somewhere."
It might reduce ad revenue from page views because Joe Sixpack can now store the "funny" clip of some guy getting his 'nads crushed by a 2x4, rather than needing to reload it live every time he wants to make his friends squirm. Unlikely. If Joe's got a decent connection, he's much more likely to simply type "2x4 nads" into YouTube's search if he wants to show it again. Much easier than making disk space and remembering where you put it.
No, this only really becomes useful if you want to put it somewhere you don't have access to YouTube -- like an iPod. Or if you're like me -- Flash performance on my Linux sucks so much that anything fullscreen is completely unwatchable, so if it's worth watching fullscreen, I download it and play it with mplayer.
Now, I do comment, sometimes excessively, by putting long rants about overall design -- particularly around a method which has serious implications on that design. But I do dispute that more comments == better, especially when you can make a chunk of code self-documenting, so that it's obvious what it's doing even if you don't understand the language in question.
And with regards to the article as a whole, I think it's a bit like the whole debate about which gender has the upper hand in a fight -- the woman, with her lower center of gravity, or the man, with his upper body strength? In almost all real-world cases, the relative difference between the skill of the fighters -- white-belt vs black-belt -- is going to make much more of a difference.
Same with coding. Experience, education, good habits, and innate intelligence are going to make much more of a difference in how readable the output is than who has a vagina.
Of course, I'm willing to be shown wrong:
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman. It would be interesting to put that to a rigorous test. But it's difficult to take that seriously when you have things like this:
Often, âoethey try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,â she tells the Business Technology Blog. âoeThey try to obfuscate things in the code,â and donâ(TM)t leave clear directions for people using it later. In other words, she's trying to make this into a competitive testosterone thing. Ignoring how competitive women can be (remember high school?), this problem is easily solved by creating a culture in which elegance and clarity is valued above cleverness.
Some people value peace and quiet more than contributing to urban sprawl and getting a cash payout -- no matter how big it is. Selling off the family farmstead is for his children who have been corrupted by modern society. or something. Depends how smart the farmer is. Sell the ranch -- or just rent it -- for anything remotely Woodstock-esque in size, and you can buy a ranch several times that size, pretty much wherever you want.
Of course, I admit he could just be content to be left alone with what he's got.
Thats the legitimacy im talking about, when random phones are running Linux and no one seems surprised about it, and end users don't even know, because its so widespread. And the same is true in many other places. BSD is in pretty much every modern network stack. Some flavor of Unix, and most often Linux, is in a majority of webservers -- millions of people use Google every day without thinking about the fact that it runs Linux.
If you mean "legitimacy within the mobile industry", fine, though it would show how myopic that industry is if they haven't seen it coming from the places Linux already owns. But Linux has more than justified its existence.
This isn't a "screw over your users" restriction, this is a "protect our service against theft" issue You can paint every DRM issue as a "protect our product/service against 'theft'" issue. I choose to view every DRM issue as a "users get screwed over, whether or not that was the intent" issue.
Now, the rules do in fact keep changing, when TiVo started using that GPL code there was no such "freedom to tinker" provision in the license Because there was no need to -- in fact, I don't think anyone, at the time, suspected that we would ever get hardware such that the source code alone was not enough to ensure freedom to tinker.
But if you look at the history of it, the whole reason for GNU and the GPL in the first place is simple: RMS had a clever hack he'd done to the old printer drivers, to help with paper jams. The lab bought a new printer, but the new printer didn't come with source code. After finally tracking down the guy who wrote the drivers, that guy basically said that even if he still had the source, there was no way he could legally give it away.
That is why GNU exists -- because RMS wanted to be able to fix (tinker with) his printer driver.
linus himself has no problem with this sort of locking. Linus is just another human. He writes a kernel, and that's pretty much it. I agree with him on some things, and disagree on others.
Simple example: Linus has had serious problems with GNOME, and serious problems trying to submit a patch to fix those problems. Yet KDE works just fine. He pretty much just tells people to use KDE now. I use KDE, and I like that endorsement, but obviously, not everyone agrees.
the amount of FPSism that abounds in certain sectors of the geek community, you'd think that they'd be desensitized to guns by now. FPSes tell me that headshots are easy, and that all it takes is a moment of not listening for footsteps, or a moment's hesitation with my own gun, and I'm dead. And here I am without even a knife... You'd think FPSes would make geeks even more sensitive to guns.
They're just there for a math joke, but for all he knows they're trying to set up the next woodstock. I somehow doubt woodstock would be his biggest fear. For that matter, if that's what they're doing, seems like a perfect opportunity to cash in on his previously-undervalued property.
HDMI is an interface. It's basically DVI plus sound.
HDCP is a copy protection system. It works over HDMI or DVI.
I love HDMI -- if only because it's easier to plugin, fewer screws, etc. I hate HDCP -- seriously, does any potential pirate have access to the kind of technology that would be required to capture a DVI signal?
By the way:
Obviously they can't stop you from cam ripping your own LCD TV but the quality would be rather poor. Probably, but not necessarily. Some of the more professional pirates will take a high-end video camera, point it at a projection screen, sync the framerate, and grab the audio straight from the sound system. Sync it all up, and it could be as good as or better than a DVD rip.
No, the way around HDCP is to completely ignore it -- it was always a pointless waste of money anyway. Instead, crack the protection surrounding the disc itself -- don't open up a cheap HDTV, open up a cheap Blu-Ray player. Then you can re-encode at your leasure.
Let's be clear: child porn is essentially a snuff-film. Snuff is a perfect example -- no amount of censoring the film will bring the person back to life.
Child pornography is not - and has never been - protected speech under the 1st amendment. However, most of alt.* is -- think alt.os.linux, or alt.sysadmin.recovery, or... Even if they were only concerned about bandwidth, it would seem easier to simply drop alt.binaries.* instead.
That's the difficult thing, and that's why this should be tagged "thinkofthechildren" -- it's not really possible to censor anything without significant collateral damage.
And just so we're clear: child pornographers rape little children in front of a camera for profit. Ok, first, why is it that we have an arbitrary "age of consent"? If you ask a little child if he wants ice cream, or if she wants a lollipop, the answer is pretty much a "yes", likely followed by a "please."
It's not as though they are incapable of forming an opinion, or making a choice. I find it almost as offensive to suggest that they have no will of their own -- that they are mindless automatons -- and thus, that they cannot consent to anything.
Is it abuse? Sure. Pretty much always coercion, at the very least. But not always "rape".
Keep in mind, the law doesn't really make a distinction between a 17-year-old and a 7-year-old here. In some states, if a 17-year-old has sex with an 18-year-old, it's rape, and the 18-year-old gets put on the watch list of child abusers.
Second, and here's the interesting part: By the time the picture is out on the Internet, the damage has already been done. The child has already been abused, and the pictures very likely aren't getting back to them.
Those children have rights, not the least of which is just the simple right to privacy after the fact, such that their pornographic images are removed from public view. What would you do in the case of an adult, though? Most likely, by the time the pictures (or videos) are already out, it's too late. I suspect that Paris Hilton could sue anyone trying to sell that video for profit, but I doubt there's much she could do to get it removed from filesharing networks.
With all that out of the way, let's assume you're completely right -- I mostly agree with you anyway. But let's assume that child pornography is the worst thing imaginable, and that if we are going to censor anything at all, let's censor this.
Except there's still significant collateral damage. In order to censor the child pornography, you either have to be able to monitor and censor all communication, or you have to do things like this -- drop access or support from large sections of the Internet because less than 1% includes child pornography.
And the same applies to the Internet as a whole. Which do you want -- an open, free Internet, which includes some things that you consider reprehensible? Or a closed, monitored, filtered Internet, which doesn't?
Except that they've already publicly admitted that this is because of censorship -- specifically, child porn -- and I'd think that alt.binaries would be the largest of all of them, speaking strictly in bytes.
So it really seems trivial for them to just drop alt.binaries.* instead of alt.* -- not that I endorse either, but dropping alt.* is a bit like dropping port 80 because it can go to thepiratebay.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Because an entirely closed system would have reached a state of equilibrium after an infinite amount of time
Again, why? Certainly, it could be a cycle (Big Bang/Crunch cycle) as a kind of equilibrium, but why couldn't it also be something like pi? Equilibrium, but each moment is unique...
Secondly, thermodynamics absolutely *depends* on conservation of energy.
Simple machines, such as levers, pulleys, etc, pretty much depend on Newton's laws. Having a special case (relativity) in which those laws don't apply in no way implies that we can stop using Newtonian physics on a smaller scale. So having a special case in which conservation of energy (or matter) is not maintained in no way invalidates thermodynamics on the scale in which it is applied.
Anything that exists outside of this realm would be by definition "higher," or "super," in the strict definition of the word.
Then this has become a semantic argument, and not particularly interesting. Relativity and superconductivity are both "supernatural", by that definition.
What I dispute is that exceptions like Relativity are in any way mystical -- or, more generally, that even things we might consider mystical, if they exist, could never be explained by some new natural law. I'm basically arguing that everything that exists is going to follow recognizable patterns (whether or not we've seen them before).
You have the US, with its own laws, but those laws don't necessarily exist outside of the country. It's a terrible analogy, but it works. You have existence, it has its laws within it, but there's no logical reason to assume they exist outside of it.
It's an interesting choice of words -- you're implying that things like god might exist, so to speak, outside of existence. We have a word for things that don't exist -- nonexistent, or "fiction".
If you're arguing that there may well be another universe entirely, that's fine, but that falls into the realm of every other "could be" that you've put forth so far. There could be a teacup in space. It's even physically possible for there to be -- the thing could orbit fast enough, after all, and we can't prove no one snuck one up with a satellite launch. But is it really worth the effort to reason about a teacup in space? Would it be anything but ludicrous to start to worship the space-teacup?
I've probably used that analogy before -- strictly speaking, even if I was fanatically fundamentalist about the known laws of science, I would have to admit to being space-teacup-agnostic. But if you asked me whether there was a teacup up there, I'd probably say "Not that I know of", or just "No."
You like to use it, but pink unicorns and the FSM are *not* logical arguments. For a rumor not to die after thousands of years is something to consider.
For what it's worth, they absolutely are logical arguments -- it's called reductio ad absurdum.
So if Scientology is still around in a thousand years, will it become something you cannot discard as ludicrous? (Hint: I think Xenu is every bit as hilarious an example as the FSM.)
Jews believe pork is unclean -- not kosher. They believe that it's because God said so. In actuality (or so I remember reading), it's likely because of a certain disease -- worms or somesuch -- which could be found in pork at the time, making it a less safe food than things which were considered kosher.
Nowdays, of course, we know a bit more about food sanitation, so pork is probably safe. But Jews continue to refuse it.
A great metaphor for religion -- maybe it filled a needed role, at one point. Maybe the human brain is simply predisposed to religion, for completely unrelated needs -- I speculate that it may be simply the natural conclusion of our instinctive need for a father figure.
Oh, by the way: Racism is something which has existed for thousands of years. So has rape
I wonder where the overall experience comes from? Oh yeah, must be all the great features. Let me put them in a list.
Fair enough, but while it hasn't happened so much yet, I suspect that an effort will be made to have Mono's P/Invoke calls map to DLLs run through Wine.
.NET app to run without any need for Wine -- so WinForms is actually implemented in Mono.
.NET app means it will also run on non-x86 platforms. While there was initially some effort to do this with Wine (specifically Darwine), I think Apple's move to x86 killed it, and in any case, it would be emulation -- .NET on non-x86 could be just as portable as Java. (Won't be, but could.)
Of course, the goal of Mono is to allow any cleanly portable
But keep in mind, a cleanly portable
Keep in mind, Wine doesn't have to be able to perfectly run every Windows app. It only needs to be able to perfectly run the ones you (or your client) actually needs.
Keep in mind, also, that there's a whole class of people who only need one or two killer apps to work. Sometimes it's something recent (Photoshop); often it's something like an old version of QuickBooks, or some obscure app that no one makes anymore. So if Wine runs legacy apps well, that's a very good start.
It seems very likely, however, that the next generation of smartphones will be trying to steal features from the iPhone -- at the very least, I'd expect (relatively) high resolution, if not touch.
I haven't looked at the economics of it, but it really does seem like satellite could operate on pretty much the same principles as over-the-air TV. I value having the source for certain things simply because i can make use of it elsewhere, and i can see what its doing. I'm not as concerned about modifying software in place, though i realize other people value this greatly. I value both quite a lot.
I value being able to understand what's going on, and use it elsewhere, because of some good experiences with open source projects which were made to be hacked up. (In particular, Capistrano has close to no documentation, but very readable source. Before reading that source, I'd have dismissed it out of hand; after reading the source, I even sent in a patch, and it now does pretty much exactly what I want.)
I also value modifying the source in-place, due to something very similar to RMS' printer problem. I had an ATI video card, and I was trying to get it working on Linux. The problem was, this was Linux 2.4, which had no built-in AGP support, and straight PCI isn't fast enough -- so ATI had embedded AGP support in their drivers. And, thankfully, they'd separated generic stuff like this AGP code out into the open source chunk -- there was still a binary blob, but I didn't have to touch it.
So, for some strange reason, the video card was properly setup and always autodetected by the motherboard as AGP 3.0 (despite tweaking the BIOS, I couldn't change this), yet the ATI drivers saw it as AGP 2.0, or 2.5, or something, and refused to work.
So I opened up the source for those ATI drivers, commented out the autodetection code, and replaced it with the single line which set it to AGP 3.0. Were I to do this today, I might put some effort into figuring out how to enable this via an insmod (now modprobe) argument, but back then, I hardly had to know C to do this.
And it worked. Perfectly, beautifully.
So that is a concern for me -- especially something like a TiVo, which, more likely than not, isn't going to be setup perfectly for me. That, and the fact that not only can others develop patches and mods, but I can get those patches and mods without them having to go through TiVo for approval.
It's a completely different purpose, though. I'd argue that modifying in-place is mostly useful for that kind of brutal hack, whereas modifying and porting is more useful for building something new and interesting.
Under that definition, all opinions are informed.
No, under that definition, opinions derived from experience are informed. Opinions derived from "because I want to believe" or "I just made this shit up" are faith. Most people's religious belief, in particular, boils down to something like that -- because I was told, and because I'd rather believe in Jesus than not, and because I read Pascal's Wager but not the FSM.
Unless you lack some faculty of the mind that they do not.... You have a confirmation bias towards the non-supernatural just as someone may have it the other way.
If the supernatural exists, it should be pretty obvious. I've been told, over and over (as I was growing up!) that people can fly -- that sufficiently enlightened humans can just take off and soar like Superman.
If I saw something like that, I wouldn't just write it off. I mean, yes, I'd check my own sanity. I'd perform some math in my head, I'd pinch myself, I'd pick up a book and try to read, and if at all possible, I'd seek out others to confirm the observation.
But there's a pretty good chance that I would rule out my own insanity and decide that I was wrong, and you were right.
Yet nothing like this has ever happened to me. The closest are blurry, unfocused and absurdly compressed YouTube videos of a man lighting some newspaper on fire with his mind -- in a way which seems very easy to fake.
nothing I say will change their mind.
Why are you trying to convince them otherwise anyway?
Where did I say I was? No, I won't try, because I know I won't get anywhere, and I won't even get a decent debate out of it.
If they're right, that means you're wrong. You failed to account for that possibility.
Giving all observations equal weight, I have never observed myself to be wrong about a supernatural experience. My observation of them relating their observations means that any evidence I do have is secondhand at best, and most likely entirely hearsay.
So yes, I accounted for it, and discarded it.
I've never seen a lot of things like quasars, solar eclipses, tornadoes, hurricanes, supernovae, great white sharks, etc. with my own eyes. I'm basing it solely on second-hand evidence.
However, in many of these cases, you can actually go and verify this yourself -- you can look at the photos taken, and the mathematics calculated, which show that quasars exist. You can look at the weather data...
Oh, and there are often hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have seen what evidence we have firsthand, especially in the case of things like tornadoes and hurricanes.
Yet you have not admitted to having a supernatural experience, you are only arguing for their possibility. So coming from you, and from everyone I know personally, and from everyone they know, I can count on one hand the number of people who have had supernatural experiences.
Again -- probably more people believe in Christ than have seen a tornado. But insanely more people have seen a tornado than have seen Christ.
That tends to be more agnostic than atheistic.
I thought about it for awhile. For a very long time, I called myself an "optimistic agnostic." Then I realized it was all weasel words, and that I just felt uncomfortable calling myself atheist.
I am agnostic in two fundamental ways: First, God is not a concept which could be known to be true or false. Any experience of God could as easily be an illusion, or an opium dream, or anything. By extension, if a god is real, it would have no way of proving itself. How do you prove omnipotence, anyway -- and that you're not just some lesser daemon who wouldn't have a chance against the real higher power?
Second, I think that Descartes had a good start -- correct translation is "I am aware, therefore I exist." That is about all we can know. Even math can only be known to the extent that we c
I think the iPhone would disagree there. Pretty much as long as Apple refuses to put Flash on the iPhone, anything iPhone-friendly will have to be some flavor of HTML. The fact that it would also work well on Linux is a bonus.
One person might need to invent a story, about a great warrior in the sky, who had a magic hammer. Every time the hammer fell, it would make a sound of thunder.
Another might say, honestly, "I don't know."
Today, we know the answer -- massive amounts of static electricity, discharging in sparks so huge and hot that the very air expands fast enough to cause a pressure wave, which we hear as thunder.
The person who said "I don't know" gets to keep asking the question, and when the answer is finally found, they won't be wrong. The person who invented the crap about Thor would have stopped searching for the answer, and if they were around to see the answer, their entire Thor story would be shown as untrue.
"I don't know" is exactly the right answer -- we don't know. The difference is, you made up a story about a big bearded man in the sky, so that you wouldn't have to admit your own ignorance. I tell you up front that I don't know. or run into the shadows of fighting about semantics ("define
Think back to the RMS story, and imagine telling this to a pissed-off RMS: "Ok, you can have the source code to this printer driver, but you can't use it with our printer." In what way is that helpful?
Yes, it's better than nothing, but it misses the point.
In other words, I'm trying to divorce your argument of "right to privacy" from age, to see if it still holds up. Should we be able to effectively recall a sex tape, and make it illegal to possess it in any form? All places in society are "monitored" by law enforcement, regardless of whether we're discussing bank robberies and protection rackets or criminal conspiracies to distribute what amounts to a child snuff-film. And Freenet is an effort to make the Internet no longer one of those places. I dispute your false dichotomy of being forced to choose between either an "open, free internet" vs. a "closed, monitored, filtered internet" by these actions of the state and privately owned ISPs. Calling it a "false dichotomy" implies that it's possible to have an "open, free internet" which is also "closed, monitored, or filtered."
I'll admit there are degrees of that -- for instance, we could have an Internet which is filtered, but not monitored, or one which is monitored, but not filtered. I would prefer something more like Freenet -- an Internet which is pretty much untouchable.
There is a further argument: If anything can be censored on the Internet, that implies that we have given someone the ability to decide what is acceptable, and what is not. Right now, that might be a very valid metric of child pornography -- maybe next time, it will be websites which express opposing political views.
The easiest way to ensure that nothing you value will be censored is to ensure that nothing is censored. I think the biggest problem with this debate is that the submitted write-up (and every write-up posted to slashdot this issue) has conflated the business interests of these ISPs (to reduce costs and limit unprofitable service) with the legal and appropriate action of censoring criminal child-pornography. Mainly because the ISP did that already. If they had said "We're dropping alt.* (or better yet, alt.binaries.*) to reduce bandwidth and storage costs," that would've been fine. Not great, especially for people who want to read alt.sysadmin.recovery or whatever, but it would make a lot more sense than what they have actually said, which is "We're dropping alt.* because there is child pornography in there somewhere."
No, this only really becomes useful if you want to put it somewhere you don't have access to YouTube -- like an iPod. Or if you're like me -- Flash performance on my Linux sucks so much that anything fullscreen is completely unwatchable, so if it's worth watching fullscreen, I download it and play it with mplayer.
That never gets old.
And with regards to the article as a whole, I think it's a bit like the whole debate about which gender has the upper hand in a fight -- the woman, with her lower center of gravity, or the man, with his upper body strength? In almost all real-world cases, the relative difference between the skill of the fighters -- white-belt vs black-belt -- is going to make much more of a difference.
Same with coding. Experience, education, good habits, and innate intelligence are going to make much more of a difference in how readable the output is than who has a vagina.
Of course, I'm willing to be shown wrong: McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman. It would be interesting to put that to a rigorous test. But it's difficult to take that seriously when you have things like this: Often, âoethey try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,â she tells the Business Technology Blog. âoeThey try to obfuscate things in the code,â and donâ(TM)t leave clear directions for people using it later. In other words, she's trying to make this into a competitive testosterone thing. Ignoring how competitive women can be (remember high school?), this problem is easily solved by creating a culture in which elegance and clarity is valued above cleverness.
Of course, I admit he could just be content to be left alone with what he's got.
If you mean "legitimacy within the mobile industry", fine, though it would show how myopic that industry is if they haven't seen it coming from the places Linux already owns. But Linux has more than justified its existence. This isn't a "screw over your users" restriction, this is a "protect our service against theft" issue You can paint every DRM issue as a "protect our product/service against 'theft'" issue. I choose to view every DRM issue as a "users get screwed over, whether or not that was the intent" issue. Now, the rules do in fact keep changing, when TiVo started using that GPL code there was no such "freedom to tinker" provision in the license Because there was no need to -- in fact, I don't think anyone, at the time, suspected that we would ever get hardware such that the source code alone was not enough to ensure freedom to tinker.
But if you look at the history of it, the whole reason for GNU and the GPL in the first place is simple: RMS had a clever hack he'd done to the old printer drivers, to help with paper jams. The lab bought a new printer, but the new printer didn't come with source code. After finally tracking down the guy who wrote the drivers, that guy basically said that even if he still had the source, there was no way he could legally give it away.
That is why GNU exists -- because RMS wanted to be able to fix (tinker with) his printer driver. linus himself has no problem with this sort of locking. Linus is just another human. He writes a kernel, and that's pretty much it. I agree with him on some things, and disagree on others.
Simple example: Linus has had serious problems with GNOME, and serious problems trying to submit a patch to fix those problems. Yet KDE works just fine. He pretty much just tells people to use KDE now. I use KDE, and I like that endorsement, but obviously, not everyone agrees.
HDCP is a copy protection system. It works over HDMI or DVI.
I love HDMI -- if only because it's easier to plugin, fewer screws, etc. I hate HDCP -- seriously, does any potential pirate have access to the kind of technology that would be required to capture a DVI signal?
By the way: Obviously they can't stop you from cam ripping your own LCD TV but the quality would be rather poor. Probably, but not necessarily. Some of the more professional pirates will take a high-end video camera, point it at a projection screen, sync the framerate, and grab the audio straight from the sound system. Sync it all up, and it could be as good as or better than a DVD rip.
No, the way around HDCP is to completely ignore it -- it was always a pointless waste of money anyway. Instead, crack the protection surrounding the disc itself -- don't open up a cheap HDTV, open up a cheap Blu-Ray player. Then you can re-encode at your leasure.
That's the difficult thing, and that's why this should be tagged "thinkofthechildren" -- it's not really possible to censor anything without significant collateral damage. And just so we're clear: child pornographers rape little children in front of a camera for profit. Ok, first, why is it that we have an arbitrary "age of consent"? If you ask a little child if he wants ice cream, or if she wants a lollipop, the answer is pretty much a "yes", likely followed by a "please."
It's not as though they are incapable of forming an opinion, or making a choice. I find it almost as offensive to suggest that they have no will of their own -- that they are mindless automatons -- and thus, that they cannot consent to anything.
Is it abuse? Sure. Pretty much always coercion, at the very least. But not always "rape".
Keep in mind, the law doesn't really make a distinction between a 17-year-old and a 7-year-old here. In some states, if a 17-year-old has sex with an 18-year-old, it's rape, and the 18-year-old gets put on the watch list of child abusers.
Second, and here's the interesting part: By the time the picture is out on the Internet, the damage has already been done. The child has already been abused, and the pictures very likely aren't getting back to them. Those children have rights, not the least of which is just the simple right to privacy after the fact, such that their pornographic images are removed from public view. What would you do in the case of an adult, though? Most likely, by the time the pictures (or videos) are already out, it's too late. I suspect that Paris Hilton could sue anyone trying to sell that video for profit, but I doubt there's much she could do to get it removed from filesharing networks.
With all that out of the way, let's assume you're completely right -- I mostly agree with you anyway. But let's assume that child pornography is the worst thing imaginable, and that if we are going to censor anything at all, let's censor this.
Except there's still significant collateral damage. In order to censor the child pornography, you either have to be able to monitor and censor all communication, or you have to do things like this -- drop access or support from large sections of the Internet because less than 1% includes child pornography.
And the same applies to the Internet as a whole. Which do you want -- an open, free Internet, which includes some things that you consider reprehensible? Or a closed, monitored, filtered Internet, which doesn't?
Except that they've already publicly admitted that this is because of censorship -- specifically, child porn -- and I'd think that alt.binaries would be the largest of all of them, speaking strictly in bytes.
So it really seems trivial for them to just drop alt.binaries.* instead of alt.* -- not that I endorse either, but dropping alt.* is a bit like dropping port 80 because it can go to thepiratebay.com.