Opera does have pop up blocking. For the in page ads just get a good hosts file setup and that should take care of the rest of the ads. Problem solved.
No automatic ad blocking.
Filterset.G has populated my filter list with over 3000 rules, which have so far blocked over 10'000 banner ads. Maintaining that list manually does not appeal to me. Secondly, a hosts file is rather limited compared to Regexs filtering on URL strings, nor does it update itself automatically to respond to new threats. Furthermore, with AdBlock, I don't even get broken image symbols; often I don't know whether a page has ads unless its layout gives the game away.
With Firefox, it takes 2 minutes tops to remove 98% to 99% of all banner advertisements, forever. It's frighteningly effective. When Opera has the same capability, I'll be interested to know about it. Until then, it's just too useful a feature to do without.
It seems a little naive to suppose that our minds are the most powerful computers in the Universe, assuming that's what you were alluding to. Besides, our brains weren't designed with high-speed electronic interface in mind; there's little evolutionary pressure to talk efficiently to high-speed calculators.
Some claim the decision was made with little or no community input.
Regardless, the community seems to be in favour, or at least in favour of giving users the choice at bootup.
And while the Novell/Microsoft deal is little more than corporate FUD, the binary driver issue and the world's most popular desktop disto's handling of the matter, is crucial. We need to pressure the hardware companies to release drivers, and Ubuntu may soon brutally undermine those efforts.
The problem is twofold. Firstly, the Linux desktop is rather a niche product, and lacks the pressure that a more popular product would have. Secondly, it's probable that the NVidia drivers contain information which NVidia considers give it a competitive edge, and open source drivers may not be beneficial enough for NVidia to give up that edge.
Frankly, I see nothing wrong with Ubuntu giving users a choice at bootup (which is my guess is what will happen), and Ubuntu has never been a 100% FOSS distro anyway.
It demonstrates that in a free market, any common and finite resource will be overexploited. This problem can be mitigated by the concept of property, where an individual entity is given ultimate control over an area of land. However, not all resources are as easy to segregate in this manner. The fish stocks in the sea are a good example; it is impractical to wall areas of the sea off in the same way that one might do with an area on land, and many fish regularly cover large distances, so if one did own a part of the sea, your couldn't guarantee that 'your' fish wouldn't stray into your neighbour's property. Those individuals who overfished would be rewarded by more fish seeking to fill the hole in the ecosystem, so there would be an inevitable incentive to over-exploit the resource. Eventually, you'd wind up with no fish, and indeed this conclusion is echoed in reality, where governments have had to step in and prevent overfishing.
One could make similar arguments about air pollution (rather difficult to have each area of land surrounded by a airtight dome), and in the very long term, even about our own Sun. Secondly, there's the question of property itself, which is essentially just a government intervention. Without the government to enforce property laws, what would stop one company trying to take over another company's land? And if you're going to allow government intervention to support this law, where do you draw the line?
If you need to be spoonfed facts that should be self evident you aren't intelligent enough to understand the point anyway.
Indeed, why provide supporting evidence for your argument when you can simply dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as unintelligent? Resorting to logical fallacies is a rather underhanded way of winning an argument, and doesn't work when people start call your bluff. Assuming, of course, that it is a deliberately ploy and not just the results of a particularly stupid mind.
But if you do have a credible argument, then by all means lets hear it.
The parent is not Insightful, or anything close to it...it gets +5, Insightful for no other reason than that it conforms with the Slashdot groupthink.
You say this, and yet you do not back up your argument. Microsoft asserts that commercial virtualization systems are not mature enough for broad use, yet such systems have had far more real world use than Vista has had. If virtualization is immature, then by surely the same standards Vista must be too.
One could equally claim that you're conforming with anti-Slashdot groupthink, where people criticise the moderators when they mod up posts why don't personally agree with.
Free markets aren't a magical solution to all economic problems. Ayn Rand thought they were, but such thinking is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. There are a number of logical thought experiments, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons effect that demonstrate the inefficiencies and problems inherent in free markets.
So, to sum these up, does that not imply that atheism neither promotes rational thought nor prevents uncritical beliefs in institutions or ideals?
On it's own, obviously not. There are a number of atheist religions, so to claim that religion is damaging and atheism is the cure is clearly nonsensical. However, on the other hand, atheism can be an entirely rational position to take, whilst religion always has an element of the irrational.
and they had no shared moral values (although I'm sure that each one had their own personal moral values) to compare their actions to and realize that "hey! we're killing tons of innocent people for no good reason, and that's wrong!"
If you accept that each person can have their own moral values, then the logical extension of that is that you can have a group of people who have similar moral values. If you have a large group of people who share 90% of their moral values, then surely such a system would be externally indistinguishable from a group of people who adhere to a centralised set of shared values, 90% of the time. In both situations, you have group of people adhering 90% of the time to a common set of morals, but reach that situation through different mechanisms.
Indeed, if you consider the nature of society, it's clear that a group of people who share similar moral values will be more cohesive than a group with wildly different moral values. If 95% of society X consists of people who think theft is wrong, whilst society Y consists of only 50% of people who think theft is wrong, then society X is probably going to be more stable than society Y. Another factor in this is that some moral codes are inevitably more efficient than others; for instance, a society where random killing is acceptable clearly isn't going to be able to cooperate for very long, as everyone would be afraid of getting bumped off.
Left to their own devices, it's not unreasonable to suggest that morality in an intelligent species will tend to clump around traits that promote survival, such as cooperation, solidarity, honesty and so forth.
Thus, not only is atheism clearly insufficient to stop this unreasoning following of those evil murdering regimes of Stalin & Mao, but neither does it carry any intrinsic upside or inspiring people to do good or charitable things.
No, it doesn't, but atheism is a side effect of rational thought, and rational thought can prevent these things. Hitler couldn't have risen to power if people started saying, "Hey, what empirical evidence does this guy have that Jews are the source of our problems? You know, I think we should methodically research his suggestion and evaluate his claim in a fair and scientific manner."
I don't think anyone is arguing for atheist fanaticism, as was seen in Nazi Germany, the USSR and other such places. People are arguing instead for rational atheist, where people arrive at an atheist viewpoint by evaluating the evidence without presupposition or prejudice.
You personally established this as a fact, or are your relying upon people you trust? Or is it a mere assumption?
Take at any widely accepted scientific theory, and the mountains of evidence backing it up. For instance, there have been literally millions of experiments carried out on Quantum Physics and General Relativity, with terabytes of data being produced daily. Compared to the rigorous, methodical tests carried out on any well established theory, evidence for God is decidedly thin on the ground.
The reason I ask, is because I see evidence of a Supreme Being in all of this natural universe. Scientific evidence, starting with the laws of thermodynamics. You see, if you start where you are, you can clearly see that there is FUNCTION throughout the universe.
But that's clearly not the only explanation one could raise. For instance, if there were many Universes, randomly occuring either in serial or in parallel, then given enough Universes, one would eventually come across one that is suitable for life. The lifeforms in this Universe may marvel at what a coincidence it is that they are alive, but in reality it's just a case of rolling the dice until its all sixes.
I'm not saying that is the case, of course; merely stating that arguing for the existence of God based on the design of the Universe just doesn't hold water. There are too many alternative, equally valid explanations. And even if you accept the design theory, it could equally be applied to God Himself.
Mind you, you won't get this from churchianity's version of Genesis, but it is there. "It was very good" literally means "functional", and not "good" in the sense of good/evil.
One wonders why a supposedly perfect God would create a Universe that was merely "functional". That's the other difficulty I have with God; a perfect being just throws up so many contradictions, especially if you're going to believe in God's Old Testament shenanigans.
I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice. - Albert Einstein
You do realise that the reason that quote is so famous is because it's widely considered to be one of Einstein's greatest errors. Einstein had a problem with the randomness inherent in Quantum Physics, but after almost a century of experiments we haven't found anything to suggest that there is any deterministic order behind the randomness we observe.
Speaking of which, this has been my impression of Atheists for some time. They have an UNREASONING BELIEF system, based upon unscientific thought. They have a Thesis, but have never considered the ANTITHESIS.
I think your impression is incorrect. I can't, of course, speak for all atheists in the world, but I can speak for myself. I classified myself as agnostic for a long time, as keeping an open mind is important to me, but then I realised I was affording God a courtesy I don't afford to many other things. For instance, I don't believe that an invisible, intangible elephant follows me around; granted, there is the possibility that such a thing occurs, but without evidence to the contrary I am inclined not to believe in such a creature.
To me, atheism is not the belief that there is no God, but a lack of any belief that one does exist. There is a subtle distinction between these two states that many people miss. It is not that I have a thesis on God; it is simply that I have discarded any thesis on God as lacking in evidence. Either God has gone out of his way to leave little trace of his existence, save for that found in ancient books of dubious objectivity, or there simply is no God. With no other evidence, I can see no reason to believe in God, or even consider it, anymore than I'd consider believing in Thor or Cthulhu.
Do you have any tangible position to argue from besides smugness?
The point is, neither do you. 4000 years of belief does not constitute evidence; it's a form of argumentum ad populum, a logical fallacy. If you propose a hypothesis, and the only argument you can give for it is an obvious fallacy, then the burden of proof remains on your shoulders.
Yes, sure. If someone points out that religion is not the root of all evil, and provides some examples, then you redefine what religion is to include those examples as religion.
It's worth noting, however, that all the examples provided are acts of violence committed due to unreasoning faith in a concept or institution. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but there's a stronger case for believing that faith is.
Regardless of whether these regimes were truly religions or not, they were all based upon unreasoning belief in a concept or institution, and religion falls into the same category. Indeed, the belief they fostered allowed them to persist; one can't have a regime that encourages rational thought and persecution, otherwise you'd have people poking holes in your arguments when you try to pin the blame on scapegoats, or try to insist that a particular group of people are subhuman.
The MSN article is completely correct. Everyone knows that people are either poor, and thus live in mud huts with only a single goat to keep them company; or they are rich, in which case they can afford to buy as many computers as they can fit inside their trendy apartments.
The creators of the $100 laptop are under the delusion that wealth is not a binary condition. For some strange reason, they seem to think that there are poor people in this world that have enough money to feed themselves and buy essentials, but not enough money or infrastructure to support buying the latest Pentium from Dell. This is clearly ridiculous, and I applaud MSN Money for reminding us that the world really is black and white (no pun intended, ahem).
This isn't always true... You are missing a couple things here. You can buy the Web version of Windows 2003 server cheaper than a supported Linux distrobution.
But that's apples to oranges, surely! Windows 2003 server does not have anywhere the same level as support as any major paid-for distribution.
Windows also does have advantages, not only could you run both Apache and IIS and offer ASP and Apache if you need it for a particular feature. The reverse is not true.
The number of businesses that have complex enough needs to require both Apache and IIS, and which lack the funds for two separate servers, and which don't want to outsource their hosting, seems to me to be likely to be rather few.
You also again are discounting the ease of use for a Windows Server installation, which is a big corporate selling point. Budget level IT staff can maintain a Windows installations much easier than most *nix solutions.
On the other hand, *nix servers tend to be far easier to manage in bulk.
I believe in the free market and the open source world, don't for a second think I don't. But to just easily dismiss Windows with 'mythical' claims of its shortcomings is nonesense and does nothing to help anyone, esepcailly if your 'ideals' prevent you from giving your clients/users the best advice or solutions possible, even if it means using MS Server products.
I don't know why you think my claims are mythical. I'm not saying MS Server products are useless, as I've mentioned many times before, I'm just saying they're mediocre. Or, if I were to be more kind, I'd say they'd cater for mediocre needs. The amount of software they'll run is limited (no Ruby on Rails, for instance), they lack complicated modules you'd find in competing products (no equivalent to mod_rewrite or mod_proxy), and don't scale well once you start dealing with very large databases (no homogeneous clustering). And these are just the problems I've run up against in the past couple of months!
I'm not saying that they're useless; far from it. All I'm saying is that if they want to expand their market share, they need to start expand out of their niche. That's it. No Microsoft-sucks conspiracy, no Linux evangelism. Just that Microsoft products don't cater for a significant (and if we are to believe IBM, the majority) portion of the market.
Now, there are certainly pockets of civilization in Europe (i.e., London, Berlin, etc.) but most of the rural areas are still coming to grips with things like electricity and indoor plumbing. If you were to walk up to your average European and say things like "Microsoft", "keyboard", "Internet", etc., you might as well be talking to a rock.
51.9% of the EU's population currently has access to the Internet, so not only does the average European know what the Internet is, he's already using it.
And considering the EU's population is 456 million, that gives approximately 236 million EU Internet users. The US's population is 296 million, and has 69.3% Internet penetration, giving 205 million US Internet users. In other words, the EU has 31 million more Internet users than the US.
Now, I realise you're a troll, but I thought these statistics might be of interest to others. Whilst I don't have statistics on the respective levels of Windows piracy in the US and EU, it's not unreasonable to say that there may be millions more Microsoft customers in the EU than there are in the US.
I couldn't agree more. The author also neglects to use useful standard functions like urllib.urlopen, instead building his own HTTP downloader function. He'd also do well to use urlparse.urljoin to turn a relative href attribute into an absolute URL, and urlparse.urlparse to check things like the protocol and host.
For example:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup from urllib import urlopen from urlparse import urljoin, urlparse
visited_urls = set() url_stack = []
for tag in BeautifulSoup(urlopen(url)).findAll("a"):
link_url = urljoin(url, tag["href"])
if urlparse(link_url)[0] == "http" and link_url not in visited_urls:
url_stack.append(link_url)
So I don't see how you can by any stretch say MS Server doesn't work well with non-MS products.
There are a large number of popular products that IIS struggles to run. Ruby on Rails is the obvious example, as I've had first hand experience trying to coax IIS into running the damn thing. The best I could come up with was a reverse proxy to a backend Mongrel server - but even that was complex, as IIS doesn't support URL rewriting or proxying. If I were using Apache, there would be no problem, as it supports both operations even in its default install; as it was, I eventually went with a commercial plugin that added some much-needed functionality to IIS.
Considering this thread is about Windows and Linux, focusing only on IIS vs Apache is not very effective, as Windows does Apache quite well.
If main benefit of a Windows Server is its ability to run Apache, then why pay the cost of a Windows license at all? In order to sell Windows, Microsoft has to offer more than its lower priced competitors. If the best argument Microsoft can put forward is, "It's runs everything Linux can, but its more expensive!", then I can't see it encouraging many people to choose Windows over a less expensive open source OS.
Then setup DNS, Server Applications, MYSQL etc etc... There is no out of the box solution that fits most users. So the difference here is that with Windows the admin sets a policy that configures the server automatically, or the admin does a few clicks to configure everything and can be done before most *nix admins find the first couple of configuration files they need to change on their particular distribution.
As I pointed out previously, you don't have to edit configuration files directly to configure systems in *nix. Also, systems like MySQL don't really need to be configured beyond their default settings for small to medium-sized applications, and are usually installed by default on server systems anyway.
You also may be understating the advantages of text configuration files. Not only are they more flexible, but they are easily copied from machine to machine, and can be extensively commented. They can be written to and altered by other programs with relative ease, allowing setup to be highly automated. I prefer configuration files, probably because I'm used to working with code. I recognise that many people steer well clear of them, but they are not without their merits.
That's not to say Windows doesn't have it's place. Linux servers are usually good for two situations; if webserver needs are basic, and are covered by the default settings of the distribution, or if your webserver needs are relatively advanced (perhaps you want to run Rails through a reverse proxy, or want a webserver cluster to run a large site). IIS covers the middle ground, hence my 'mediocre' comment.
The problem with aiming for the middle ground is that complex configurations can be outsourced, and due to the ease of cloning configurations for no additional cost, one can sell in bulk to customers who want similar systems.
Or, to put it another way, if Microsoft's server offerings are so effective, why do they not hold a majority market share?
Individual is not enought. It has to be self-sustainable self-reproducing enthic minority.
Why? Also, what about countries that were founded from a mix of ethnicities, such as the US? And what about countries that would collapse if not for the food aid they get, such as North Korea?
"Should we interfere and liberate Tibet? " No. YOU, personally, as American, exhausted your interference quota up to 1000 years ahead.
What makes you think I am an American?
"What population does the country have to have? A million? " It is not defined by population size. It is defined by willingness of people to die for the independence. For example, Chechens deserve their independence, while Tibetians probably do not.
I see. An interesting take from someone who has personally risked their life to guarantee the independence of their country. You have personally risked your own life, haven't you? It seems a little easy for someone to say that they'd die for their independence, if they haven't lived in a totalitarian regime.
Out of interest, you say that a country is not defined by population size, but you've also said that a country's population has to be greater than one. Would a sexually active man and woman, willing to die for their independence, and part of a ethnic minority (whatever that is) be considered a country in your eyes?
"If an armed gang took control of a small US town, and announced that it was now a sovereign state, would you advocate that the US government leave the town alone?" No. Armed gang is not self-sustainable and it is not self-reproducible.
The armed gang would just be the totalitarian government; the population would be the captured town, and it seems reasonable to assume that a town of people could be self-sustainable and self-reproducible.
"In what way? " In a very simple way: if it will become real pain in the neck, Chinese people will overthrow it. The Chinese revolts happened in the past, do not worry. They know what they are doing. Talk to your Chinese co-workers. Americans unfortunately do not have the quality.
The US has been considerably more successful in their revolts than the Chinese. The last American revolt gave them a free democratic government, a constitution that was rather ahead of its time in terms of rights, an economy and military that eventually succeeded all others in the world, and a nation that has so far lasted over two centuries.
The last Chinese revolt on the other hand (if you can call the Chinese Civil War that), resulted in a communist dictatorship that resulted in corruption and hyperinflation that for a good 40 years languished in poverty. Compare China's economic growth to Japan's in the same period, and you'll see the huge gulf between the two economies. Only within the past 15 years, with China opening up its markets to private business, has its economy begun to grow at a significant rate.
So I'm not sure how you rate the quality of Chinese revolts as being greater than American ones. Now, if you were talking quantity...
Current government is real pain in the neck but nobody is going to overthrow it. There is not a single lazybone senator soul proposing an impeachment of this hunta of degenerates.
The current US administration, bad as it is, has a long way to fall before it gets as bad as China.
why should the Chinese government control it?" Because they are already controlling it.
Uh... That's a reason?
"Gee, shouldn't we stop that bear gnawing Paul's face off like that?" "Nah, it's already doing it."
"Hey officer! Shouldn't you stop that man gunning down those children?" "Why? He's already doing it.
Taiwan belongs to China (same people), Tibet - does not (different people). Criterium is very simple: self-identification.
Just self-identification? That's an unusually generous criteria. By that logic, anyone individual who considered themselves to be independent of their native land could claim to be a sovereign country.
I'm also curious about your non-interventionist policy. You claim Tibet is a separate country, yet it is controlled by China. Should we interfere and liberate Tibet? And if not, does that mean that the world should be run on a "survival of the fittest" basis, with stronger countries swallowing weaker countries?
And incidentally, if Taiwan had a referendum and voted for independence, would you consider them a sovereign country, even if the PRC said it was still their territory?
It is not moral relativism, because I have my moral and I am living by it, but when there is a whole country with a different moral, I do not interfere.
What population does the country have to have? A million? A thousand? A dozen? One? If an armed gang took control of a small US town, and announced that it was now a sovereign state, would you advocate that the US government leave the town alone? What if the majority of the citizens supported the move to independence? Would you support it then? Where exactly do you draw the line?
". But if you believed that, then you'd have no problem with powerful countries trying to force their notion of human rights on other countries." Do not put your words into my mouth. I said exactly the opposite.
Read what I said again. I said if you believed that. In other words, I was saying that you don't believe might makes right, because if you did, you'd believe it was right to force China to change its human rights record.
"What makes China's government so special?" The fact that it is "Chinese", it is controlled and responsible to "Chinies", not "Americans".
Responsible to? In what way? It's a totalitarian government, not a democracy; the Chinese population don't have a say in the matter. And again, the issue of Tibet crops up. You've already said it's a separate country; why should the Chinese government control it? And if it shouldn't, should countries like the US help? What if the US developed a hypothetical superweapon, allowing them to take back Tibet bloodlessly - would it be morally justified in your view to liberate Tibet then?
All the lists comparing different aspects "human rights" in different countries are just plain vanilla idiotic imperialistic propaganda machines for one simple reason: peopple of different countries have different notions of "human rights".
Nonsense. Utter rubbish. How do you define a country? It's just a grouping of people and property through a set of constructed constraints. Saying "People of different countries have different notions of 'human rights'" is the same thing as saying, "People have different notions of 'human rights'". This may be true, but using it as a basis to advocate inaction is utter idiocy.
If we have no right to judge China by our own morality, then does China have any right to judge Taiwan? Or Tibet? Or even its own provinces? Or even it's own people? What's the difference between the government of China keeping political prisoners, and criminals holding people hostage in the US? If you're going to make the argument for moral relativism, then you can't just apply it to countries or cultures, as these concepts have no absolute definition. Who's to say a single man isn't a culture to himself? Or a sovereign nation if he declares himself so?
You could, I suppose, make the dubious statement that might means right. The US government can imprison one of its citizens because it has the power to back up its claim. But if you believed that, then you'd have no problem with powerful countries trying to force their notion of human rights on other countries. Or you could argue that the US government has the power to imprison its citizens, because it was democratically elected, and the will of the majority overrules the wishes of the individual; but that can't apply to China, as it's not a democratic system.
So what gives a government like China the right to control its citizens, but prevents an entity like the US from trying to control the Chinese government? What makes China's government so special?
Java is an easy to learn, fully cross platform (and by fully, i don't mean pseduofully like most languages, if you code a GUI in Java, you don't need to install stuff like GTK+ to make it work in windows / linux)
Uh, what's the practical difference between using a built in cross-platform GUI like Swing, and using an third-party cross-platform library like GTK?
I'm primarily a C++ programmer, but my current occupation requires that I code java most of the time, and to be honest, i don't mind, it's much less of a problem making sure everything doesn't segfault, and with a true OO nature, it's just a joy to use.
I was a Java coder for around a year, and it certainly isn't a bad language. It has a somewhat basic syntax though, and if you're used to more advanced languages it can be rather frustrating to find that your preferred solution to a problem is impractical due to Java's structural limitations. I tend to prefer languages that let me work more abstractly.
Government should be delegated a right to censor Internet the same way the censor any public media: television, radio, newspapers by various means.
There is nothing new about and nothing to worry. You have to worry WHO you elect to the government.
Politicians are voted in and out of office depending on the information the voters possess. If you give politicians unrestricted access to censor the information the voters receive, the democratic process collapses. Voters cannot make informed choices if their communication channels are significantly impaired, either by censorship, or misinformation.
In any case, what advantage does any form of censorship have for the ones being censored? How are people's lives enriched by denying them access to certain types of information?
Slashdot Mirror
No automatic ad blocking.
Filterset.G has populated my filter list with over 3000 rules, which have so far blocked over 10'000 banner ads. Maintaining that list manually does not appeal to me. Secondly, a hosts file is rather limited compared to Regexs filtering on URL strings, nor does it update itself automatically to respond to new threats. Furthermore, with AdBlock, I don't even get broken image symbols; often I don't know whether a page has ads unless its layout gives the game away.
With Firefox, it takes 2 minutes tops to remove 98% to 99% of all banner advertisements, forever. It's frighteningly effective. When Opera has the same capability, I'll be interested to know about it. Until then, it's just too useful a feature to do without.
It seems a little naive to suppose that our minds are the most powerful computers in the Universe, assuming that's what you were alluding to. Besides, our brains weren't designed with high-speed electronic interface in mind; there's little evolutionary pressure to talk efficiently to high-speed calculators.
No automatic ad blocking :(
Regardless, the community seems to be in favour, or at least in favour of giving users the choice at bootup.
The problem is twofold. Firstly, the Linux desktop is rather a niche product, and lacks the pressure that a more popular product would have. Secondly, it's probable that the NVidia drivers contain information which NVidia considers give it a competitive edge, and open source drivers may not be beneficial enough for NVidia to give up that edge.
Frankly, I see nothing wrong with Ubuntu giving users a choice at bootup (which is my guess is what will happen), and Ubuntu has never been a 100% FOSS distro anyway.
It demonstrates that in a free market, any common and finite resource will be overexploited. This problem can be mitigated by the concept of property, where an individual entity is given ultimate control over an area of land. However, not all resources are as easy to segregate in this manner. The fish stocks in the sea are a good example; it is impractical to wall areas of the sea off in the same way that one might do with an area on land, and many fish regularly cover large distances, so if one did own a part of the sea, your couldn't guarantee that 'your' fish wouldn't stray into your neighbour's property. Those individuals who overfished would be rewarded by more fish seeking to fill the hole in the ecosystem, so there would be an inevitable incentive to over-exploit the resource. Eventually, you'd wind up with no fish, and indeed this conclusion is echoed in reality, where governments have had to step in and prevent overfishing.
One could make similar arguments about air pollution (rather difficult to have each area of land surrounded by a airtight dome), and in the very long term, even about our own Sun. Secondly, there's the question of property itself, which is essentially just a government intervention. Without the government to enforce property laws, what would stop one company trying to take over another company's land? And if you're going to allow government intervention to support this law, where do you draw the line?
Indeed, why provide supporting evidence for your argument when you can simply dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as unintelligent? Resorting to logical fallacies is a rather underhanded way of winning an argument, and doesn't work when people start call your bluff. Assuming, of course, that it is a deliberately ploy and not just the results of a particularly stupid mind.
But if you do have a credible argument, then by all means lets hear it.
You say this, and yet you do not back up your argument. Microsoft asserts that commercial virtualization systems are not mature enough for broad use, yet such systems have had far more real world use than Vista has had. If virtualization is immature, then by surely the same standards Vista must be too.
One could equally claim that you're conforming with anti-Slashdot groupthink, where people criticise the moderators when they mod up posts why don't personally agree with.
Free markets aren't a magical solution to all economic problems. Ayn Rand thought they were, but such thinking is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. There are a number of logical thought experiments, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons effect that demonstrate the inefficiencies and problems inherent in free markets.
On it's own, obviously not. There are a number of atheist religions, so to claim that religion is damaging and atheism is the cure is clearly nonsensical. However, on the other hand, atheism can be an entirely rational position to take, whilst religion always has an element of the irrational.
If you accept that each person can have their own moral values, then the logical extension of that is that you can have a group of people who have similar moral values. If you have a large group of people who share 90% of their moral values, then surely such a system would be externally indistinguishable from a group of people who adhere to a centralised set of shared values, 90% of the time. In both situations, you have group of people adhering 90% of the time to a common set of morals, but reach that situation through different mechanisms.
Indeed, if you consider the nature of society, it's clear that a group of people who share similar moral values will be more cohesive than a group with wildly different moral values. If 95% of society X consists of people who think theft is wrong, whilst society Y consists of only 50% of people who think theft is wrong, then society X is probably going to be more stable than society Y. Another factor in this is that some moral codes are inevitably more efficient than others; for instance, a society where random killing is acceptable clearly isn't going to be able to cooperate for very long, as everyone would be afraid of getting bumped off.
Left to their own devices, it's not unreasonable to suggest that morality in an intelligent species will tend to clump around traits that promote survival, such as cooperation, solidarity, honesty and so forth.
No, it doesn't, but atheism is a side effect of rational thought, and rational thought can prevent these things. Hitler couldn't have risen to power if people started saying, "Hey, what empirical evidence does this guy have that Jews are the source of our problems? You know, I think we should methodically research his suggestion and evaluate his claim in a fair and scientific manner."
I don't think anyone is arguing for atheist fanaticism, as was seen in Nazi Germany, the USSR and other such places. People are arguing instead for rational atheist, where people arrive at an atheist viewpoint by evaluating the evidence without presupposition or prejudice.
Take at any widely accepted scientific theory, and the mountains of evidence backing it up. For instance, there have been literally millions of experiments carried out on Quantum Physics and General Relativity, with terabytes of data being produced daily. Compared to the rigorous, methodical tests carried out on any well established theory, evidence for God is decidedly thin on the ground.
But that's clearly not the only explanation one could raise. For instance, if there were many Universes, randomly occuring either in serial or in parallel, then given enough Universes, one would eventually come across one that is suitable for life. The lifeforms in this Universe may marvel at what a coincidence it is that they are alive, but in reality it's just a case of rolling the dice until its all sixes.
I'm not saying that is the case, of course; merely stating that arguing for the existence of God based on the design of the Universe just doesn't hold water. There are too many alternative, equally valid explanations. And even if you accept the design theory, it could equally be applied to God Himself.
One wonders why a supposedly perfect God would create a Universe that was merely "functional". That's the other difficulty I have with God; a perfect being just throws up so many contradictions, especially if you're going to believe in God's Old Testament shenanigans.
You do realise that the reason that quote is so famous is because it's widely considered to be one of Einstein's greatest errors. Einstein had a problem with the randomness inherent in Quantum Physics, but after almost a century of experiments we haven't found anything to suggest that there is any deterministic order behind the randomness we observe.
I think your impression is incorrect. I can't, of course, speak for all atheists in the world, but I can speak for myself. I classified myself as agnostic for a long time, as keeping an open mind is important to me, but then I realised I was affording God a courtesy I don't afford to many other things. For instance, I don't believe that an invisible, intangible elephant follows me around; granted, there is the possibility that such a thing occurs, but without evidence to the contrary I am inclined not to believe in such a creature.
To me, atheism is not the belief that there is no God, but a lack of any belief that one does exist. There is a subtle distinction between these two states that many people miss. It is not that I have a thesis on God; it is simply that I have discarded any thesis on God as lacking in evidence. Either God has gone out of his way to leave little trace of his existence, save for that found in ancient books of dubious objectivity, or there simply is no God. With no other evidence, I can see no reason to believe in God, or even consider it, anymore than I'd consider believing in Thor or Cthulhu.
The point is, neither do you. 4000 years of belief does not constitute evidence; it's a form of argumentum ad populum, a logical fallacy. If you propose a hypothesis, and the only argument you can give for it is an obvious fallacy, then the burden of proof remains on your shoulders.
It's worth noting, however, that all the examples provided are acts of violence committed due to unreasoning faith in a concept or institution. Religion may not be the root of all evil, but there's a stronger case for believing that faith is.
Regardless of whether these regimes were truly religions or not, they were all based upon unreasoning belief in a concept or institution, and religion falls into the same category. Indeed, the belief they fostered allowed them to persist; one can't have a regime that encourages rational thought and persecution, otherwise you'd have people poking holes in your arguments when you try to pin the blame on scapegoats, or try to insist that a particular group of people are subhuman.
The MSN article is completely correct. Everyone knows that people are either poor, and thus live in mud huts with only a single goat to keep them company; or they are rich, in which case they can afford to buy as many computers as they can fit inside their trendy apartments.
The creators of the $100 laptop are under the delusion that wealth is not a binary condition. For some strange reason, they seem to think that there are poor people in this world that have enough money to feed themselves and buy essentials, but not enough money or infrastructure to support buying the latest Pentium from Dell. This is clearly ridiculous, and I applaud MSN Money for reminding us that the world really is black and white (no pun intended, ahem).
But that's apples to oranges, surely! Windows 2003 server does not have anywhere the same level as support as any major paid-for distribution.
The number of businesses that have complex enough needs to require both Apache and IIS, and which lack the funds for two separate servers, and which don't want to outsource their hosting, seems to me to be likely to be rather few.
On the other hand, *nix servers tend to be far easier to manage in bulk.
I don't know why you think my claims are mythical. I'm not saying MS Server products are useless, as I've mentioned many times before, I'm just saying they're mediocre. Or, if I were to be more kind, I'd say they'd cater for mediocre needs. The amount of software they'll run is limited (no Ruby on Rails, for instance), they lack complicated modules you'd find in competing products (no equivalent to mod_rewrite or mod_proxy), and don't scale well once you start dealing with very large databases (no homogeneous clustering). And these are just the problems I've run up against in the past couple of months!
I'm not saying that they're useless; far from it. All I'm saying is that if they want to expand their market share, they need to start expand out of their niche. That's it. No Microsoft-sucks conspiracy, no Linux evangelism. Just that Microsoft products don't cater for a significant (and if we are to believe IBM, the majority) portion of the market.
51.9% of the EU's population currently has access to the Internet, so not only does the average European know what the Internet is, he's already using it.
And considering the EU's population is 456 million, that gives approximately 236 million EU Internet users. The US's population is 296 million, and has 69.3% Internet penetration, giving 205 million US Internet users. In other words, the EU has 31 million more Internet users than the US.
Now, I realise you're a troll, but I thought these statistics might be of interest to others. Whilst I don't have statistics on the respective levels of Windows piracy in the US and EU, it's not unreasonable to say that there may be millions more Microsoft customers in the EU than there are in the US.
For example:
There are a large number of popular products that IIS struggles to run. Ruby on Rails is the obvious example, as I've had first hand experience trying to coax IIS into running the damn thing. The best I could come up with was a reverse proxy to a backend Mongrel server - but even that was complex, as IIS doesn't support URL rewriting or proxying. If I were using Apache, there would be no problem, as it supports both operations even in its default install; as it was, I eventually went with a commercial plugin that added some much-needed functionality to IIS.
If main benefit of a Windows Server is its ability to run Apache, then why pay the cost of a Windows license at all? In order to sell Windows, Microsoft has to offer more than its lower priced competitors. If the best argument Microsoft can put forward is, "It's runs everything Linux can, but its more expensive!", then I can't see it encouraging many people to choose Windows over a less expensive open source OS.
As I pointed out previously, you don't have to edit configuration files directly to configure systems in *nix. Also, systems like MySQL don't really need to be configured beyond their default settings for small to medium-sized applications, and are usually installed by default on server systems anyway.
You also may be understating the advantages of text configuration files. Not only are they more flexible, but they are easily copied from machine to machine, and can be extensively commented. They can be written to and altered by other programs with relative ease, allowing setup to be highly automated. I prefer configuration files, probably because I'm used to working with code. I recognise that many people steer well clear of them, but they are not without their merits.
That's not to say Windows doesn't have it's place. Linux servers are usually good for two situations; if webserver needs are basic, and are covered by the default settings of the distribution, or if your webserver needs are relatively advanced (perhaps you want to run Rails through a reverse proxy, or want a webserver cluster to run a large site). IIS covers the middle ground, hence my 'mediocre' comment.
The problem with aiming for the middle ground is that complex configurations can be outsourced, and due to the ease of cloning configurations for no additional cost, one can sell in bulk to customers who want similar systems.
Or, to put it another way, if Microsoft's server offerings are so effective, why do they not hold a majority market share?
3337 - 2 != 1337
Why? Also, what about countries that were founded from a mix of ethnicities, such as the US? And what about countries that would collapse if not for the food aid they get, such as North Korea?
What makes you think I am an American?
I see. An interesting take from someone who has personally risked their life to guarantee the independence of their country. You have personally risked your own life, haven't you? It seems a little easy for someone to say that they'd die for their independence, if they haven't lived in a totalitarian regime.
Out of interest, you say that a country is not defined by population size, but you've also said that a country's population has to be greater than one. Would a sexually active man and woman, willing to die for their independence, and part of a ethnic minority (whatever that is) be considered a country in your eyes?
The armed gang would just be the totalitarian government; the population would be the captured town, and it seems reasonable to assume that a town of people could be self-sustainable and self-reproducible.
The US has been considerably more successful in their revolts than the Chinese. The last American revolt gave them a free democratic government, a constitution that was rather ahead of its time in terms of rights, an economy and military that eventually succeeded all others in the world, and a nation that has so far lasted over two centuries.
The last Chinese revolt on the other hand (if you can call the Chinese Civil War that), resulted in a communist dictatorship that resulted in corruption and hyperinflation that for a good 40 years languished in poverty. Compare China's economic growth to Japan's in the same period, and you'll see the huge gulf between the two economies. Only within the past 15 years, with China opening up its markets to private business, has its economy begun to grow at a significant rate.
So I'm not sure how you rate the quality of Chinese revolts as being greater than American ones. Now, if you were talking quantity...
The current US administration, bad as it is, has a long way to fall before it gets as bad as China.
Uh... That's a reason?
"Gee, shouldn't we stop that bear gnawing Paul's face off like that?"
"Nah, it's already doing it."
"Hey officer! Shouldn't you stop that man gunning down those children?"
"Why? He's already doing it.
Just self-identification? That's an unusually generous criteria. By that logic, anyone individual who considered themselves to be independent of their native land could claim to be a sovereign country.
I'm also curious about your non-interventionist policy. You claim Tibet is a separate country, yet it is controlled by China. Should we interfere and liberate Tibet? And if not, does that mean that the world should be run on a "survival of the fittest" basis, with stronger countries swallowing weaker countries?
And incidentally, if Taiwan had a referendum and voted for independence, would you consider them a sovereign country, even if the PRC said it was still their territory?
What population does the country have to have? A million? A thousand? A dozen? One? If an armed gang took control of a small US town, and announced that it was now a sovereign state, would you advocate that the US government leave the town alone? What if the majority of the citizens supported the move to independence? Would you support it then? Where exactly do you draw the line?
Read what I said again. I said if you believed that. In other words, I was saying that you don't believe might makes right, because if you did, you'd believe it was right to force China to change its human rights record.
Responsible to? In what way? It's a totalitarian government, not a democracy; the Chinese population don't have a say in the matter. And again, the issue of Tibet crops up. You've already said it's a separate country; why should the Chinese government control it? And if it shouldn't, should countries like the US help? What if the US developed a hypothetical superweapon, allowing them to take back Tibet bloodlessly - would it be morally justified in your view to liberate Tibet then?
Nonsense. Utter rubbish. How do you define a country? It's just a grouping of people and property through a set of constructed constraints. Saying "People of different countries have different notions of 'human rights'" is the same thing as saying, "People have different notions of 'human rights'". This may be true, but using it as a basis to advocate inaction is utter idiocy.
If we have no right to judge China by our own morality, then does China have any right to judge Taiwan? Or Tibet? Or even its own provinces? Or even it's own people? What's the difference between the government of China keeping political prisoners, and criminals holding people hostage in the US? If you're going to make the argument for moral relativism, then you can't just apply it to countries or cultures, as these concepts have no absolute definition. Who's to say a single man isn't a culture to himself? Or a sovereign nation if he declares himself so?
You could, I suppose, make the dubious statement that might means right. The US government can imprison one of its citizens because it has the power to back up its claim. But if you believed that, then you'd have no problem with powerful countries trying to force their notion of human rights on other countries. Or you could argue that the US government has the power to imprison its citizens, because it was democratically elected, and the will of the majority overrules the wishes of the individual; but that can't apply to China, as it's not a democratic system.
So what gives a government like China the right to control its citizens, but prevents an entity like the US from trying to control the Chinese government? What makes China's government so special?
Uh, what's the practical difference between using a built in cross-platform GUI like Swing, and using an third-party cross-platform library like GTK?
I was a Java coder for around a year, and it certainly isn't a bad language. It has a somewhat basic syntax though, and if you're used to more advanced languages it can be rather frustrating to find that your preferred solution to a problem is impractical due to Java's structural limitations. I tend to prefer languages that let me work more abstractly.
Politicians are voted in and out of office depending on the information the voters possess. If you give politicians unrestricted access to censor the information the voters receive, the democratic process collapses. Voters cannot make informed choices if their communication channels are significantly impaired, either by censorship, or misinformation.
In any case, what advantage does any form of censorship have for the ones being censored? How are people's lives enriched by denying them access to certain types of information?