If I own something that has value and someone else takes it and prevents me from profitting myself from it, that is theft, plain and simple.
: The concept that someone who is taking the effort to aggregate the behavior of millions is stealing from you personally is stupidity.
It's just as nonsensical as the concept of advertisers losing money if people delete cookies. Or the concept of losing money on non-sales because of piracy. No money is changing hands, and no goods are stolen. Just business models that reach the end of their useful life.
In my experience people stop using Firefox when incompatible extension updates have made a mess of their user profile, and they get random Firefox crashes.
They will try reinstalling the browser, which doesn't work, and then go back to IE.
Removing their user profile folder (while salvaging bookmarks) usually solves the problem.
It's a sad fact that the holders of some political worldviews think they can bend reality to match their ideology. E.g., Lysenkoism and Deutsche Physik.
These people also tend to think existing science is already bent to match some hostile ideology. They are paranoid.
For practical people in the middle ages the debate about whether planets where moving in a simple elliptic orbit around the sun, or whether they were moving around the earth in a complicated system of circular orbits was completely academic, without utility, and unverifiable. Today we know the church definitely overplayed its hand by trying to settle the issue because we can actually go into space to verify that they were wrong.
In the case of for instance Deutsche Physik it is possible to reject theories like relativity on esthetic grounds (or because of its jewishness), as long as competing theories that are more esthetically pleasing to you keep yielding the correct predictions. Rejection of theories on the wrong grounds is a counter-productive way of conducting science, but not one consciously aimed at peddling false predictions. German engineering was certainly based on sound real world physics throughout WWII; Nazis focused their paranoia elsewhere.
Today we are going a step further. The political debate on global warming is actually worse, because of its immediate utility and the potential consequences of coming to the wrong conclusion. The conflict is about whose prediction of the near future is accepted as a guide to public policy. People taking positions in this debate may be proven wrong in their lifetime.
On a scale of tens of thousands of years it's obvious that the planet has a cyclic climate, oscillating between ice ages and periods of warmer temperatures than we have now.
There is a much shorter climate-related transgression cycle for most coasts. In the Netherlands geology, archeology, and history suggest roughly the following cycle for the last few millenia:
Duinkerke III B (1000 - 1200) Duinkerke III A (800 - 1000) Duinkerke II (250 - 600) Duinkerke I (500 - 200 BC) Duinkerke 0 (1500 - 1000 BC) Calais IV B (2150 - 1800 BC) Calais IV A2 (2450 - 2150 BC) Calais IV A1 (2700 - 2450 BC) Calais III (3300 - 2700 BC)
The recent stability of coastlines is clearly exceptional. The map of Ptolemaeus for instance, based on Duinkerke I data, shows most of the Netherlands, a part of Belgium, the east of England, and the Venice area in Italy missing (consistent with a modest rise of the sea level).
Peat formation occurs only in specific cold, wet, and acidic conditions. If land along the coast contains a large amount of peat, a few degrees of warming causing just a slight rise of the sea level, also causes the land to sink. In a few decades land can sink into the sea or turn into a lake, as our ancestors have frequently seen happening in the early middle ages. In 2003 we had two small floods in the Netherlands caused by collapsing peat dikes because of the unusually dry weather.
In the case of Siberia there is another major catalyst for quick change: melting of frozen water in peat. A little change in climate can have great consequences, apparently.
If we have reached some sort of tipping point then hold on. Humans will either learn to adapt or we'll die. I happen to think we'll adapt just fine.
Me too, but I am starting to get slightly worried about the future value of my house.
While we're at it, Christians didn't write Genesis either.
Much of it is also found in ancient Sumerian tales, and as the bible attests to in various places peoples borrowed gods, ideas, and texts liberally from each other. There was no copyright law in those days.
Here's an interesting question for you: were there Jews (who did write Genesis) in Greece and Rome? Can anyone speak as to whether and how they could have influenced those democratic ideas?
World history ain't my thing. I'm asking a question here, not espousing a theory...
Knowing world history quite well I suggest that you rephrase that question to "where their Greeks in Israel?" Certainly for a long time. The Romans were in Israel too, of course, but they arrived on the scene quite late.
Anyway, I think the suggestion that Genesis in any way supports a political system is mistaken, just like the belief that freedom and democracy are somehow closely related.
This really all goes back to the Magna Carta -- the first successful challenge to the equally religious notion that kings were kings because God wanted them to be born that way, and everybody better do what the king says because that's what God wants.
Firstly, the Magna Charta does not challenge the proposition that John is king by the grace of God. Secondly, absolute monarchy is a much newer (16th/17th century) concept competing with parliamentarism and republicanism.
In John's time nobody would have thought of legally or morally challenging the absoluteness of monarchy, because that notion did not exist at all. There is no Celtic or Germanic tradition of absolute monarchy. Even the Romans, with their divine emperors, had another tradition before that.
That God can establish kings over men is clear from 1 Sam 8:1-12:25. He can also replace bad kings as the same narrative makes clear. Nowhere does the bible suggest that the king's authority is absolute; It only says that God gave Israel a king because the people of Israel wanted one. My ancestors put the traditional teaching of God's grace as follows (Act of Abjuration, 1581):
It is apparent to all that a prince is constituted by God to be ruler of a people, to defend them from oppression and violence as the shepherd his sheep. God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects, to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them.
That's a modest interpretation of the king's role. The various conflicts in the 16th/17th century (as opposed to the 18th-20th century) that ended some monarchies are about a state that became increasingly oppressive, not about the philophical foundations of that oppression. I fail to see how freedom is better safeguarded in a democracy, or how the bible mandates democracies. The bible does not advocate a political system; The absoluteness of parliamentary democracy can be rejected on the same grounds as absolute monarchy.
There is a difference between a society that is growing and a society that has a growing population. Bangladesh, Zaire, Madagascar, and Rwanda are all countries that have >2% annual increase in population. They aren't exactly making leaps and bounds into First World status. Whereas India and China are doing exactly that, and coincidentally enough, right after they managed to wrestle their population growth rates down to manageable levels.
I agree that today population growth is counter-productive for large parts of the world, and that it is counter-productive for a small hunting & gathering tribe in the neolithic age.
Christian morality in Western Europe, however, mostly spread in a context of population booms following a regression of the sea and increased productivity in agriculture in the 10th century. At least where I come from. Christian kingdoms were apparently more able to take advantage of surplus land for population growth than non-Christian kingdoms for some reason. A universal Christian morality took root only very slowly; Note that only in the 15th/17th centuries Christians systematically started attacking 'witchcraft' i.a. for its abortion practices in Europe outside the core areas of the Roman empire (Including Brittania for unclear reasons). The power which Europe exercised over the rest of the world in the centuries following that is arguably based on high growth rates caused by its belief system (but only in circumstances where it is rewarded).
Even today, religious Christians enjoy a higher birth rate, as even the difference between the US - which has a higher birth rate and more Christians - and Europe testifies. The same is true for Muslims. Today's population growth-induced famines are generally in Christian and Muslim areas. Look at the highest population growth rates. Today borders are more or less fixed, and "pagans" are the minority. In the past Christians and Muslims have spread at the expense of pagans.
Even an equal treatment polygyny differs from, say, gay marriage in that so many fundamental legal notions (wills & last testaments, power of attorney, child care & visitation, etc, etc) assume that a civil union/marriage comprises only two people.
Wills are interesting as an instrument. Another succesful "sexual" innovation is primogeniture, independently discovered by different cultures. But when it served its purpose (establishing strong kingdoms that survive until today as states) it was eventually abandoned because it also caused abject poverty. The crusades, and mass migration to colonies, are both consequences of a high population growth combined with primogeniture.
The fact that a practice causes famine or poverty does not mean it cannot conquer the world. Succesful and good are not the same thing, as Darwinism teaches us.
Because of their reduced (but still steady) growth rate, these societies out-lasted and eventually displaced the other societies.
Societies that don't allow prostitution, contraceptives, porn, abortions, and other forms of sex than procreation sex grow faster than societies that do.
Christianity did not conquer a world of free-love small tribes. Societies grow because circumstances happen to allow growth; desirable growth rate depends on circumstances.
Polygamy is different. It is just to stop men killing each other over having sex with scarce women, which is counterproductive in a society for different reasons. If men do not get old for some reason, there are valid reasons for polygamy if the growth rate should be increased.
Who decides what is "grossly immoral"? You, the government? Immorality (sin) is personal between you and your god(s). Crime is a social violation that harms others. The acts of consenting adults are not crimes.
While I generally agree with your message, I would like to point out that mores (or mos majorum), from which the word morality is derived, is the wisdom of ancestors. It is akin to taboo and custom.
Immorality has nothing to do with sin, or religion in general. Most of our mores were invented long before Christianity, and attempts by Christian politicians to usurp the concept should be resisted vigorously.
Porn is as old as mankind. Mores tell us that it should be hidden fom plain view. The problem now is that it is no longer effectively taboo, because it is too easy to run into on the internet accidentally.
I do agree that problem exists, but taxing seems a completely ineffective way of restoring a taboo to me. It must be made invisible to the people who feel "harmed" by exposure to it. Think of an analogy of "indecent exposure" for web sites that attract "clicks" too aggressively.
You can not have Good / Evil without religion as Good / Evil imply a post existence accounting. Without religion, you can only have best / worse for me / society.
Wherever there are two deontic norms A and B, there is the theoretical possibility of a moral dilemma forcing one to weigh norms A and B and to decide which is the better one, or whether there is some middle road better than either following A or B. A deontic norm separates the good from the bad, but decisions are only better or worse when evaluated against a complex normative system. People who deny that are just hypocryts, and not necessarily Christian ones.
Religions, moral philosophies, and legal systems all posit deontic norms. The differences are in the claims to legitimacy of these norms, and whether the normative system itself posits norms (lex posterior, lex specialis etc) for resolving moral dilemmas.
The Bible is completely deficient in this respect. It only acknowledges the existence of the weighing problem (e.g. in the parable of the good Samaritan) without actually trying to resolve it in a systematic way.
Then it is lucky that the bill specifically states than only pornography depicting activities which "ChillyWillie" from/. doesn't participate in is going to be taxed.
Tax pissing on faces. It ruins perfectly good facial gangbang videos. Besides, what message is this pissing stuff conveying to our children? Pissing on faces is definitely not part of normal sex.
However, today's games are so much more complex. Games rarely have a singluar objective anymore - it's a series of puzzles to be solved while destroying an enemy while strategizing moves while battling/collaborating with other users online... There is no simplicity to be named fun here. Doom3 might be fun in its slaughter but is the gameplay and the plot solid?
Plot? You mean doom3 is something more than multiplayer pacman with guns and pretty graphics?
Recipes can get legal protection through being "trade secrets", though. This recipe doesn't have that restriction, so it's a lot freer than any other beer I can think of.
It's a non issue. Beer is not cola. In countries with beer culture (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK to some extent, types of recipe were often originally linked to towns, to abbeys etc.
The basic recipes have been in the public domain for centuries, and you are not held back in any way from making a beer similar to wellknown brand beers.
There are lots of micro-breweries that sell beer, and recipes are easy to come by. It is also not very hard to make a beer that is better than the commercial ones. It is just hard to market it and make a profit. Compare with orange juice: everyone can make good fresh orange juice, but the knowledge will not make you rich.
The secret to making wine, liquor, bread, and cheese is also in the public domain. This "free-as-in-speech beer" thing is mildly funny, but I don't want to be bored with free-as-in-speech bread or free-as-in-speech cheese.
There are a few beers that dominate the world market, but that is only because of shelf space and brand recognition, not closed source recipes or technology lock-in or whatever.
Having seen the recipe, I don't think this beer is worth trying btw.
I wonder if anyone's gotten out of a ticket by showing how inaccurate most speed-check methods can be.
Many people do. In the Netherlands, the website Flitsservice, besides offering an always up to date database of police radar and laser traps for Tomtom Navigator and giving information to major radio stations, assists with appeals against speeding tickets with standard letters etc. They also try to photograph the setup if you call in to report a speed trap.
They suggest that you have a good chance appealing, certainly against hand laser speeding tickets, by claiming that the equipment was used wrongly, since it can be used only at a precise angle, within 400 meters distance, not through a car window, not in bad weather, only by a certified officer etc. Municipal police officers get it wrong all the time. Highway police are better at it. The web site also explains the procedures to correctly set up a Gatsometer or Multanova radar, but everything in Dutch unfortunately.
For Americans, the Maccarone vs. New Jersey case is relevant. A dirty or damaged license plate will result in an invalid laser measurement. For the British, there is the Speedtrap Bible.
While I don't particularly like the grouping feature of the XP taskbar, if I have several windows open it's much more efficient for me to go straight to the corresponding button on the taskbar than to leaf through a stack of open windows until I found the right one.
I like the idea of grouping, but not in the mouse-oriented way it is implemented now.
Why not loose the pointless 'desktop' and replace it with a treetable-based explorer showing running tasks, grouped by application. Click the task to open the associated window, and drop file on the application to open a new task (or task to replace the file it works on). Move mouse to bottom of screen to minimize all windows. The explorer widgets are wellknown and can be completely navigated with the keyboard and the mouse. A change like this is easily implemented on top of linux, and does not break existing applications.
There are hundreds of user interface projects going, but everyone stays with the 'desktop metaphor', even though it is a complete failure. Windows worked, the 'desktop' did not. The 'start menu' and its linux clones are also stupid. There is lots of screen real estate to be reused, if you add a simple mouse gesture for 'minimize all windows' for the users who cannot be bothered to remember a keyboard shortcut.
Intuitive? The biggest similarity I see between my computer desktop and the real desktop the computer is on is that the recycle bin looks somewhat like my ashtray. What exactly is intuitive about folding a window? I never fold windows, and I don't have windows on my desktop. It's just another obscure feature to help people get rsi. More different microscopic movements is just what I was waiting for.
I think unemployment of CS graduates with a solid engineering education is a myth. We have huge difficulties filling positions here in the Netherlands.
Respond here if you are unemployed, interested, and fit the profile:
We probably have up to six positions this fall, ranging from junior researchers to a lead programmer. We are a semi-government research institute in the inner city of Amsterdam with an international reputation in our field, working for Dutch and European government most of the time. Core business is building decision support systems for law (fiscal, administrative, social security, spatial planning, etc.). Since we have experience with having foreign employees, language will not be a problem internally.
Pay is average (by Dutch standards) but day care for children, health, retirement, and disability arrangements are good and solid: the same package as Dutch civil servants (ABP nominal funding ratio for future liabilities is 121% and it was awarded the IPE Gold Award for best performing Pension Fund in Europe several times in the last few years).
Occasionally attending scientific conferences in the US is part of the job. You have 21 to 25 free days a year, depending on age. Tenure is a possibility, but experience shows that we like only a third of the people we hire.
What we need is people with academic education competent in some of the following: logic, programming (mostly java/C++), knowledge representation, linguistics, writing reports and papers (in English), and legal theory. We will assess programming and writing competence. Communication and negotiation skills, and a thick skin are also required for our line of work.
Willingness to learn Dutch (and French, German if we want you to) to interact with clients, to learn Dutch and European law, and doing a PhD thesis if you don't have a PhD degree yet, is required. We arrange the education with the University of Amsterdam, you invest your free time. Working hours are flexible, but many.
This is not a job offer, but I know the openings are going to be there, and we are going to have great trouble filling them again.
I wonder what has changed from the 1960's-80's and today. Why is it today most companies don't want to offer health insurance or pensions, or make people pay into their own private funds. What has changed? Companies could afford it back then, but today they outsource work, they close factories, and they don't want to pay workers.
Several things have changed. We have learned that we cannot really afford the benefits promised in those days.
Population growth is leveling off and average age is increasing, increasing the non-productive proportion of the population significantly. We also decided to start competing with the rest of the world on a slightly more level playing field, after we coerced them into a harsh kind of capitalism, and pay a more equitable price for oil, which also happens to be running out. We pay increasing interest over debt, notably the government debt created by the delayed public expenses of our parents. At the same time we consume much more per capita, and inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, inside Western economies has been increasing as well.
It is an unlikely, and actually suspect, miracle we still seem to be able to pay for all of this. The short term strategies we use for this are consumption growth at the expense of saving (look at the scary graph), cutting government benefits and services, artificially inflating real estate and stock prices, and more government deficits. Some countries even go as far as simply attacking oil-producing countries to intimidate them.
There are four possible medium and long term strategies: consuming much less per capita, inventing things that really increase productivity and using them in such a way that they actually do, cancellation of debt (which reduces the Gini coefficient, but usually requires a Napoleon, Lenin, or Hitler to effect the cancellation), or fencing off or killing a significant part of the world population.
The people that benefit from the increasing Gini coefficient, who also happen to rule us, are not in a hurry to solve the problem as long as there are still short-term solutions left. My hunch is that eventually we will go with the last solution first. The pretexts are already being created.
[..] there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls "Silence is Golden," that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. [..] By contrast, in the Windows culture, you're programming for Aunt Marge, and Aunt Marge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly [..]
Aunt Marge is right. It is a golden rule in Windows that programs that failed badly will usually produce no output whatsoever. Therefore open your task manager and try to kill it if it produces no sign of live.
A corollary of this golden rule is that the badly failed program will usually not respond to the kill event either. This is i.a. because for many years most Microsoft example programs included with Visual C++ did not properly check for being killed. Microsoft culture does not accept failure, and does not waste useful time programming meaningful feedback messages.
On a per MB basis, floppies are already more expensive than USB drives. It is just that most do not need the capacity. These drives will likely replace the floppy as soon as the cost is below $.10 a MB, or a 128MB for around $10.
This will happen very soon. Just checked what I would pay for 64MB: $10-16. Companies are starting to give them away, and my sister in law received one with a few photos on it last week from a customer in her shop (and later called me to ask how the thing is used).
The slow 4-5Mbps drives have been dropping in price very fast, as people are starting to differentiate between drives and no longer believe the nonsense about usb 2 drives with a speed "up to 480 mbps".
The via mini-itx platform is great in small spaces where you want little noise, and when the available power is limited. You can run multiple mini-itx setups with one cheap ups, and you can run it on portable solar panels and in cars.
Whether it is cheap from a capex point of view depends on the situation: there are valid applications for it in small inner city offices, in cars, and in the third world.
This guy seems to be running his server in his bedroom at home, probably over a DSL line. The bottleneck is the DSL line, and the server is plenty fast IMO to keep up with that.
I wouldn't want to be within 100 yards of this vacuum cleaner.
The mini-itx setups probably use so little power that they can do without cooling altogether, even on the power supplies.
I don't think there is a more silent way of mounting the 28 hard disks, but the hard disks consume much more power than the computers. Cutting down on the number of hard disks is a better idea.
Why is it that liberal is being demonized by people who claim to worship Jesus Christ who was perhaps the biggest most passive liberal who ever lived. He was so passive that he let himself be killed. Most liberals today arent nearly that liberal.
I do not believe in the existence of God, but I do know the theory quite well. You misunderstand what Jesus supposedly did. Let me quote the current Pope,
Ratzinger himself, who is supposed to be a very good theologist:
Jesus did not act as a liberal reformer recommending and himself presenting a more understanding interpretation of the law. In Jesus' exchange with the Jewish authorities of his time, we are not dealing with a confrontation between a liberal reformer and an ossified traditionalist hierarchy.
Such a view, though common, fundamentally misunderstands the conflict of the New Testament and does justice neither to Jesus nor to Israel.
Rather Jesus opened up the law quite theologically conscious of, and claiming to be, acting as Son, with the authority of God himself, in innermost unity with God, the Father. Only God himself could fundamentally reinterpret the law and manifest that its broadening transformation and conservation is its actually intended meaning.
Jesus' interpretation of the law makes sense only if it is interpretation with divine authority, if God interprets himself. The quarrel between Jesus and the Jewish authorities of his time is finally not a matter of this or that particular infringement of the law but rather of Jesus' claim to act "ex auctoritate divina," indeed, to be this "auctoritas" himself. "I and the Father are one" (Jn. 10:30).
Jesus is the legislator himself who is crucified by his loyal subjects because he violates the law. Jesus is not a liberal, and the Pharisees are not conservatives.
It is of course possible to read the New Testament as a progressive-conservative conflict, if you reject the idea that Jesus acts ex auctoritate divina.
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If I own something that has value and someone else takes it and prevents me from profitting myself from it, that is theft, plain and simple.
: The concept that someone who is taking the effort to aggregate the behavior of millions is stealing from you personally is stupidity.
It's just as nonsensical as the concept of advertisers losing money if people delete cookies. Or the concept of losing money on non-sales because of piracy. No money is changing hands, and no goods are stolen. Just business models that reach the end of their useful life.
What you can't do is make a copy of the book, or a copy of your CD, and give that to your friend while you keep the original.
What I want to be able to do is make a copy of a CD, use the copy in my car, and keep the original at home.
In my experience people stop using Firefox when incompatible extension updates have made a mess of their user profile, and they get random Firefox crashes.
They will try reinstalling the browser, which doesn't work, and then go back to IE.
Removing their user profile folder (while salvaging bookmarks) usually solves the problem.
It's a sad fact that the holders of some political worldviews think they can bend reality to match their ideology. E.g., Lysenkoism and Deutsche Physik.
These people also tend to think existing science is already bent to match some hostile ideology. They are paranoid.
For practical people in the middle ages the debate about whether planets where moving in a simple elliptic orbit around the sun, or whether they were moving around the earth in a complicated system of circular orbits was completely academic, without utility, and unverifiable. Today we know the church definitely overplayed its hand by trying to settle the issue because we can actually go into space to verify that they were wrong.
In the case of for instance Deutsche Physik it is possible to reject theories like relativity on esthetic grounds (or because of its jewishness), as long as competing theories that are more esthetically pleasing to you keep yielding the correct predictions. Rejection of theories on the wrong grounds is a counter-productive way of conducting science, but not one consciously aimed at peddling false predictions. German engineering was certainly based on sound real world physics throughout WWII; Nazis focused their paranoia elsewhere.
Today we are going a step further. The political debate on global warming is actually worse, because of its immediate utility and the potential consequences of coming to the wrong conclusion. The conflict is about whose prediction of the near future is accepted as a guide to public policy. People taking positions in this debate may be proven wrong in their lifetime.
On a scale of tens of thousands of years it's obvious that the planet has a cyclic climate, oscillating between ice ages and periods of warmer temperatures than we have now.
There is a much shorter climate-related transgression cycle for most coasts. In the Netherlands geology, archeology, and history suggest roughly the following cycle for the last few millenia:
Duinkerke III B (1000 - 1200)
Duinkerke III A (800 - 1000)
Duinkerke II (250 - 600)
Duinkerke I (500 - 200 BC)
Duinkerke 0 (1500 - 1000 BC)
Calais IV B (2150 - 1800 BC)
Calais IV A2 (2450 - 2150 BC)
Calais IV A1 (2700 - 2450 BC)
Calais III (3300 - 2700 BC)
The recent stability of coastlines is clearly exceptional. The map of Ptolemaeus for instance, based on Duinkerke I data, shows most of the Netherlands, a part of Belgium, the east of England, and the Venice area in Italy missing (consistent with a modest rise of the sea level).
Peat formation occurs only in specific cold, wet, and acidic conditions. If land along the coast contains a large amount of peat, a few degrees of warming causing just a slight rise of the sea level, also causes the land to sink. In a few decades land can sink into the sea or turn into a lake, as our ancestors have frequently seen happening in the early middle ages. In 2003 we had two small floods in the Netherlands caused by collapsing peat dikes because of the unusually dry weather.
In the case of Siberia there is another major catalyst for quick change: melting of frozen water in peat. A little change in climate can have great consequences, apparently.
If we have reached some sort of tipping point then hold on. Humans will either learn to adapt or we'll die. I happen to think we'll adapt just fine.
Me too, but I am starting to get slightly worried about the future value of my house.
While we're at it, Christians didn't write Genesis either.
Much of it is also found in ancient Sumerian tales, and as the bible attests to in various places peoples borrowed gods, ideas, and texts liberally from each other. There was no copyright law in those days.
Here's an interesting question for you: were there Jews (who did write Genesis) in Greece and Rome? Can anyone speak as to whether and how they could have influenced those democratic ideas?
World history ain't my thing. I'm asking a question here, not espousing a theory...
Knowing world history quite well I suggest that you rephrase that question to "where their Greeks in Israel?" Certainly for a long time. The Romans were in Israel too, of course, but they arrived on the scene quite late.
Anyway, I think the suggestion that Genesis in any way supports a political system is mistaken, just like the belief that freedom and democracy are somehow closely related.
This really all goes back to the Magna Carta -- the first successful challenge to the equally religious notion that kings were kings because God wanted them to be born that way, and everybody better do what the king says because that's what God wants.
Firstly, the Magna Charta does not challenge the proposition that John is king by the grace of God. Secondly, absolute monarchy is a much newer (16th/17th century) concept competing with parliamentarism and republicanism.
In John's time nobody would have thought of legally or morally challenging the absoluteness of monarchy, because that notion did not exist at all. There is no Celtic or Germanic tradition of absolute monarchy. Even the Romans, with their divine emperors, had another tradition before that.
That God can establish kings over men is clear from 1 Sam 8:1-12:25. He can also replace bad kings as the same narrative makes clear. Nowhere does the bible suggest that the king's authority is absolute; It only says that God gave Israel a king because the people of Israel wanted one. My ancestors put the traditional teaching of God's grace as follows (Act of Abjuration, 1581):
It is apparent to all that a prince is constituted by God to be ruler of a people, to defend them from oppression and violence as the shepherd his sheep. God did not create the people slaves to their prince, to obey his commands, whether right or wrong, but rather the prince for the sake of the subjects, to govern them according to equity, to love and support them as a father his children or a shepherd his flock, and even at the hazard of life to defend and preserve them.
That's a modest interpretation of the king's role. The various conflicts in the 16th/17th century (as opposed to the 18th-20th century) that ended some monarchies are about a state that became increasingly oppressive, not about the philophical foundations of that oppression. I fail to see how freedom is better safeguarded in a democracy, or how the bible mandates democracies. The bible does not advocate a political system; The absoluteness of parliamentary democracy can be rejected on the same grounds as absolute monarchy.
I agree that today population growth is counter-productive for large parts of the world, and that it is counter-productive for a small hunting & gathering tribe in the neolithic age.
Christian morality in Western Europe, however, mostly spread in a context of population booms following a regression of the sea and increased productivity in agriculture in the 10th century. At least where I come from. Christian kingdoms were apparently more able to take advantage of surplus land for population growth than non-Christian kingdoms for some reason. A universal Christian morality took root only very slowly; Note that only in the 15th/17th centuries Christians systematically started attacking 'witchcraft' i.a. for its abortion practices in Europe outside the core areas of the Roman empire (Including Brittania for unclear reasons). The power which Europe exercised over the rest of the world in the centuries following that is arguably based on high growth rates caused by its belief system (but only in circumstances where it is rewarded).
Even today, religious Christians enjoy a higher birth rate, as even the difference between the US - which has a higher birth rate and more Christians - and Europe testifies. The same is true for Muslims. Today's population growth-induced famines are generally in Christian and Muslim areas. Look at the highest population growth rates. Today borders are more or less fixed, and "pagans" are the minority. In the past Christians and Muslims have spread at the expense of pagans.
Even an equal treatment polygyny differs from, say, gay marriage in that so many fundamental legal notions (wills & last testaments, power of attorney, child care & visitation, etc, etc) assume that a civil union/marriage comprises only two people.
Wills are interesting as an instrument. Another succesful "sexual" innovation is primogeniture, independently discovered by different cultures. But when it served its purpose (establishing strong kingdoms that survive until today as states) it was eventually abandoned because it also caused abject poverty. The crusades, and mass migration to colonies, are both consequences of a high population growth combined with primogeniture.
The fact that a practice causes famine or poverty does not mean it cannot conquer the world. Succesful and good are not the same thing, as Darwinism teaches us.
Because of their reduced (but still steady) growth rate, these societies out-lasted and eventually displaced the other societies.
Societies that don't allow prostitution, contraceptives, porn, abortions, and other forms of sex than procreation sex grow faster than societies that do.
Christianity did not conquer a world of free-love small tribes. Societies grow because circumstances happen to allow growth; desirable growth rate depends on circumstances.
Polygamy is different. It is just to stop men killing each other over having sex with scarce women, which is counterproductive in a society for different reasons. If men do not get old for some reason, there are valid reasons for polygamy if the growth rate should be increased.
Who decides what is "grossly immoral"? You, the government? Immorality (sin) is personal between you and your god(s). Crime is a social violation that harms others. The acts of consenting adults are not crimes.
While I generally agree with your message, I would like to point out that mores (or mos majorum), from which the word morality is derived, is the wisdom of ancestors. It is akin to taboo and custom.
Immorality has nothing to do with sin, or religion in general. Most of our mores were invented long before Christianity, and attempts by Christian politicians to usurp the concept should be resisted vigorously.
Porn is as old as mankind. Mores tell us that it should be hidden fom plain view. The problem now is that it is no longer effectively taboo, because it is too easy to run into on the internet accidentally.
I do agree that problem exists, but taxing seems a completely ineffective way of restoring a taboo to me. It must be made invisible to the people who feel "harmed" by exposure to it. Think of an analogy of "indecent exposure" for web sites that attract "clicks" too aggressively.
You can not have Good / Evil without religion as Good / Evil imply a post existence accounting. Without religion, you can only have best / worse for me / society.
Wherever there are two deontic norms A and B, there is the theoretical possibility of a moral dilemma forcing one to weigh norms A and B and to decide which is the better one, or whether there is some middle road better than either following A or B. A deontic norm separates the good from the bad, but decisions are only better or worse when evaluated against a complex normative system. People who deny that are just hypocryts, and not necessarily Christian ones.
Religions, moral philosophies, and legal systems all posit deontic norms. The differences are in the claims to legitimacy of these norms, and whether the normative system itself posits norms (lex posterior, lex specialis etc) for resolving moral dilemmas.
The Bible is completely deficient in this respect. It only acknowledges the existence of the weighing problem (e.g. in the parable of the good Samaritan) without actually trying to resolve it in a systematic way.
Then it is lucky that the bill specifically states than only pornography depicting activities which "ChillyWillie" from /. doesn't participate in is going to be taxed.
Tax pissing on faces. It ruins perfectly good facial gangbang videos. Besides, what message is this pissing stuff conveying to our children? Pissing on faces is definitely not part of normal sex.
However, today's games are so much more complex. Games rarely have a singluar objective anymore - it's a series of puzzles to be solved while destroying an enemy while strategizing moves while battling/collaborating with other users online... There is no simplicity to be named fun here. Doom3 might be fun in its slaughter but is the gameplay and the plot solid?
Plot? You mean doom3 is something more than multiplayer pacman with guns and pretty graphics?
Recipes can get legal protection through being "trade secrets", though. This recipe doesn't have that restriction, so it's a lot freer than any other beer I can think of.
It's a non issue. Beer is not cola. In countries with beer culture (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK to some extent, types of recipe were often originally linked to towns, to abbeys etc.
The basic recipes have been in the public domain for centuries, and you are not held back in any way from making a beer similar to wellknown brand beers.
There are lots of micro-breweries that sell beer, and recipes are easy to come by. It is also not very hard to make a beer that is better than the commercial ones. It is just hard to market it and make a profit. Compare with orange juice: everyone can make good fresh orange juice, but the knowledge will not make you rich.
The secret to making wine, liquor, bread, and cheese is also in the public domain. This "free-as-in-speech beer" thing is mildly funny, but I don't want to be bored with free-as-in-speech bread or free-as-in-speech cheese.
There are a few beers that dominate the world market, but that is only because of shelf space and brand recognition, not closed source recipes or technology lock-in or whatever.
Having seen the recipe, I don't think this beer is worth trying btw.
I wonder if anyone's gotten out of a ticket by showing how inaccurate most speed-check methods can be.
Many people do. In the Netherlands, the website Flitsservice, besides offering an always up to date database of police radar and laser traps for Tomtom Navigator and giving information to major radio stations, assists with appeals against speeding tickets with standard letters etc. They also try to photograph the setup if you call in to report a speed trap.
They suggest that you have a good chance appealing, certainly against hand laser speeding tickets, by claiming that the equipment was used wrongly, since it can be used only at a precise angle, within 400 meters distance, not through a car window, not in bad weather, only by a certified officer etc. Municipal police officers get it wrong all the time. Highway police are better at it. The web site also explains the procedures to correctly set up a Gatsometer or Multanova radar, but everything in Dutch unfortunately.
For Americans, the Maccarone vs. New Jersey case is relevant. A dirty or damaged license plate will result in an invalid laser measurement. For the British, there is the Speedtrap Bible.
While I don't particularly like the grouping feature of the XP taskbar, if I have several windows open it's much more efficient for me to go straight to the corresponding button on the taskbar than to leaf through a stack of open windows until I found the right one.
I like the idea of grouping, but not in the mouse-oriented way it is implemented now.
Why not loose the pointless 'desktop' and replace it with a treetable-based explorer showing running tasks, grouped by application. Click the task to open the associated window, and drop file on the application to open a new task (or task to replace the file it works on). Move mouse to bottom of screen to minimize all windows. The explorer widgets are wellknown and can be completely navigated with the keyboard and the mouse. A change like this is easily implemented on top of linux, and does not break existing applications.
There are hundreds of user interface projects going, but everyone stays with the 'desktop metaphor', even though it is a complete failure. Windows worked, the 'desktop' did not. The 'start menu' and its linux clones are also stupid. There is lots of screen real estate to be reused, if you add a simple mouse gesture for 'minimize all windows' for the users who cannot be bothered to remember a keyboard shortcut.
Intuitive? The biggest similarity I see between my computer desktop and the real desktop the computer is on is that the recycle bin looks somewhat like my ashtray. What exactly is intuitive about folding a window? I never fold windows, and I don't have windows on my desktop. It's just another obscure feature to help people get rsi. More different microscopic movements is just what I was waiting for.
I think unemployment of CS graduates with a solid engineering education is a myth. We have huge difficulties filling positions here in the Netherlands.
Respond here if you are unemployed, interested, and fit the profile:
We probably have up to six positions this fall, ranging from junior researchers to a lead programmer. We are a semi-government research institute in the inner city of Amsterdam with an international reputation in our field, working for Dutch and European government most of the time. Core business is building decision support systems for law (fiscal, administrative, social security, spatial planning, etc.). Since we have experience with having foreign employees, language will not be a problem internally.
Pay is average (by Dutch standards) but day care for children, health, retirement, and disability arrangements are good and solid: the same package as Dutch civil servants (ABP nominal funding ratio for future liabilities is 121% and it was awarded the IPE Gold Award for best performing Pension Fund in Europe several times in the last few years).
Occasionally attending scientific conferences in the US is part of the job. You have 21 to 25 free days a year, depending on age. Tenure is a possibility, but experience shows that we like only a third of the people we hire.
What we need is people with academic education competent in some of the following: logic, programming (mostly java/C++), knowledge representation, linguistics, writing reports and papers (in English), and legal theory. We will assess programming and writing competence. Communication and negotiation skills, and a thick skin are also required for our line of work.
Willingness to learn Dutch (and French, German if we want you to) to interact with clients, to learn Dutch and European law, and doing a PhD thesis if you don't have a PhD degree yet, is required. We arrange the education with the University of Amsterdam, you invest your free time. Working hours are flexible, but many.
This is not a job offer, but I know the openings are going to be there, and we are going to have great trouble filling them again.
I wonder what has changed from the 1960's-80's and today. Why is it today most companies don't want to offer health insurance or pensions, or make people pay into their own private funds. What has changed? Companies could afford it back then, but today they outsource work, they close factories, and they don't want to pay workers.
Several things have changed. We have learned that we cannot really afford the benefits promised in those days.
Population growth is leveling off and average age is increasing, increasing the non-productive proportion of the population significantly. We also decided to start competing with the rest of the world on a slightly more level playing field, after we coerced them into a harsh kind of capitalism, and pay a more equitable price for oil, which also happens to be running out. We pay increasing interest over debt, notably the government debt created by the delayed public expenses of our parents. At the same time we consume much more per capita, and inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, inside Western economies has been increasing as well.
It is an unlikely, and actually suspect, miracle we still seem to be able to pay for all of this. The short term strategies we use for this are consumption growth at the expense of saving (look at the scary graph), cutting government benefits and services, artificially inflating real estate and stock prices, and more government deficits. Some countries even go as far as simply attacking oil-producing countries to intimidate them. There are four possible medium and long term strategies: consuming much less per capita, inventing things that really increase productivity and using them in such a way that they actually do, cancellation of debt (which reduces the Gini coefficient, but usually requires a Napoleon, Lenin, or Hitler to effect the cancellation), or fencing off or killing a significant part of the world population.
The people that benefit from the increasing Gini coefficient, who also happen to rule us, are not in a hurry to solve the problem as long as there are still short-term solutions left. My hunch is that eventually we will go with the last solution first. The pretexts are already being created.
From the article:
[..] there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls "Silence is Golden," that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. [..] By contrast, in the Windows culture, you're programming for Aunt Marge, and Aunt Marge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly [..]
Aunt Marge is right. It is a golden rule in Windows that programs that failed badly will usually produce no output whatsoever. Therefore open your task manager and try to kill it if it produces no sign of live.
A corollary of this golden rule is that the badly failed program will usually not respond to the kill event either. This is i.a. because for many years most Microsoft example programs included with Visual C++ did not properly check for being killed. Microsoft culture does not accept failure, and does not waste useful time programming meaningful feedback messages.
On a per MB basis, floppies are already more expensive than USB drives. It is just that most do not need the capacity. These drives will likely replace the floppy as soon as the cost is below $.10 a MB, or a 128MB for around $10.
This will happen very soon. Just checked what I would pay for 64MB: $10-16. Companies are starting to give them away, and my sister in law received one with a few photos on it last week from a customer in her shop (and later called me to ask how the thing is used).
The slow 4-5Mbps drives have been dropping in price very fast, as people are starting to differentiate between drives and no longer believe the nonsense about usb 2 drives with a speed "up to 480 mbps".
The via mini-itx platform is great in small spaces where you want little noise, and when the available power is limited. You can run multiple mini-itx setups with one cheap ups, and you can run it on portable solar panels and in cars.
Whether it is cheap from a capex point of view depends on the situation: there are valid applications for it in small inner city offices, in cars, and in the third world.
This guy seems to be running his server in his bedroom at home, probably over a DSL line. The bottleneck is the DSL line, and the server is plenty fast IMO to keep up with that.
I wouldn't want to be within 100 yards of this vacuum cleaner.
The mini-itx setups probably use so little power that they can do without cooling altogether, even on the power supplies.
I don't think there is a more silent way of mounting the 28 hard disks, but the hard disks consume much more power than the computers. Cutting down on the number of hard disks is a better idea.
Why is it that liberal is being demonized by people who claim to worship Jesus Christ who was perhaps the biggest most passive liberal who ever lived. He was so passive that he let himself be killed. Most liberals today arent nearly that liberal.
I do not believe in the existence of God, but I do know the theory quite well. You misunderstand what Jesus supposedly did. Let me quote the current Pope, Ratzinger himself, who is supposed to be a very good theologist:
Jesus did not act as a liberal reformer recommending and himself presenting a more understanding interpretation of the law. In Jesus' exchange with the Jewish authorities of his time, we are not dealing with a confrontation between a liberal reformer and an ossified traditionalist hierarchy.
Such a view, though common, fundamentally misunderstands the conflict of the New Testament and does justice neither to Jesus nor to Israel.
Rather Jesus opened up the law quite theologically conscious of, and claiming to be, acting as Son, with the authority of God himself, in innermost unity with God, the Father. Only God himself could fundamentally reinterpret the law and manifest that its broadening transformation and conservation is its actually intended meaning.
Jesus' interpretation of the law makes sense only if it is interpretation with divine authority, if God interprets himself. The quarrel between Jesus and the Jewish authorities of his time is finally not a matter of this or that particular infringement of the law but rather of Jesus' claim to act "ex auctoritate divina," indeed, to be this "auctoritas" himself. "I and the Father are one" (Jn. 10:30).
Jesus is the legislator himself who is crucified by his loyal subjects because he violates the law. Jesus is not a liberal, and the Pharisees are not conservatives.
It is of course possible to read the New Testament as a progressive-conservative conflict, if you reject the idea that Jesus acts ex auctoritate divina.