So there weren't villiage idiots one thousand years ago? Your argument on connection introversion or extroversion with modern warfare isn't merely weak. It's totally unexplained. Perhaps you have some great insight into this that you'd like to share with us, because what you just said did not convey information. Perhaps you're an extrovert, then.
In all seriousness, though, your comment reeks of arrogance. What you fail to understand is that, yes, people are stupid. And conversation, especially petty conversation, can seem silly. But when you talk to someone, you get the chance to understand him. As another poster pointed out, conversation isn't a very efficient medium for information exchange, but it works very well for reading someone's personality.
When I say a meaningless joke or a polite phrase, I'm often doing it to figure out other people's reactions. By seeing how people react to my behavior, I can better understand what makes them tick.
What you demonstrate isn't introversion. It's merely arrogance. I can fully sympathise with disdain for your fellow man. After all, we engage in wars--something you apparently rejoice in--we can't take care of each other, we embrace meaningless religions rather than trying to actually better ourselfs or each other. But there is an upside, as well, to each of these downsides. You aren't wise or insightful. You're just deluding yourself to stroke your own ego.
Camp X-Ray seems a pretty clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Classifying anyone swept up in the US captures in Afghanistan--including, reportedly, at least one crippled, half-blind 70-year-old man--as an "irregular" to avoid being bound by the Geneva Convention is BS and everyone knows it. There's no way to rationally say, "Well, they wouldn't meet us on the battlefield the way we wanted and get their asses kicked, so, by dint of being geurrilla warriors, they are irregulars who don't deserve basic human rights." And after all our complaints about Iraqi abuses--showing bodies on TV and beating Jessica Lynch (something which never actually happened)--it's a bit hypocritical to then go and do the same (and, of course, to then show the corpses of Saddam's sons on TV).
But detecting irony has never been this administration's strong point.
Re: side note. It is interesting that Lincoln, thought of as such a great hero of democracy, took such liberal steps with respect to the Constitution. Were we lucky? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the ends justify the means, either, and I think the risk of losing our freedom to a "patriot" is a lot greater than that of losing it to Iraq.
Actually, only American citizens are granted rights to a fair trial, etc. Illegal aliens, un-naturalized immigrants, and the like can be summarily deported by the INS, or at least that's my understanding.
Or, for that matter, they can be thrown into camp X-Ray for an indeterminate period of time.
That's what makes cases like this one, or that of Jose Padilla such poster-cases. The victims were American citizens denied of their rights. It doesn't matter, as I was saying in the parent post, that these people are accused terrorists. Even if they really are terrorists, they must be given a fair trial; removing someone's right to a fair trial to determine if he may be a terrorist based on the accusation that he is a terrorist is self-defeating.
Well, defeating of our legal system. Not an issue if you want to imprison people at will in a near-police state by intimidating the voters with threats of terrorist attacks.
Reasonable doubt is the test for civil cases, in my understanding. If I sue you, I must provide evidence of wrongdoing beyond reasonable doubt.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt is the test for criminal cases. In other words, the "burden of proof" is pretty much distributed in a civil case--IANAL, though--while in a criminal case, it is up to the prosecution to prove innocence. You are not inherently presumed innocent of civil wrongdoings. But you are assumed innocent of criminal wrongdoing.
I'm aware of the video. I'm not aware of that particular part. And I think you overestimate the degree of sympathy "leftists at the Guardian" may have for him.
You chose a video from unknown sources in credibility over an interview with a respected--despite your ridiculous comment--news source. Yeah, way to go.
Regarding the respectability of Al Jazeera; just because it's Arab news doesn't mean it's automatically pro-Qaeda, so to speak. You know, they often get quite a bit of flak from right-wing Arab extremists for being American lackeys. Really. Which probably means they're on the right track.
Yes. I'm sure they're more anti-American than Voice of America. But you're falling for Ari Fleischer propoganda--he called Al Jazeera "all Osama, all the time"--if you allow yourself to make the simplistic assumption that, hey, they're Arab. And al Qaeda's Arab. So there's a connection.
He's a journalist with The Guardian, I believe, but I could be wrong. He spent some time living in Afghanistan interviewing bin Laden.
In an Al Jazeera interview in October, 2001, bin Laden denied involvement in any direct planning.
"Despite this I maintain that [American] allegations [of my involvement in terrorist attacks] are false, unless it means that I am involved in inciting and goading them, which is very clear and to which I confess at all times. I was one of those who signed an edict calling for jihad and we have incited for several years now and, thank God, many brothers adhered to our calls."
I don't know where he said that the people carrying out the attacks didn't even know what they were attacking. Perhaps you can provide a link?
My impression is that he is largely just a religious leader. He calls for jihad, yes, but he does not call for what targets to be attacked, or when, or how. He did allegedly suggest the World Trade Center as a target, but this is a far cry from organizing the whole thing himself.
People often say, "Yeah, but he was a terrorist! He has no rights! I have no sympathy. Do you really want this guy to go to trial and risk him being set free?"
Yes. He does have rights. As an American citizen, he is innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt. He is an alleged terrorist. Quite a difference. And if you really think tearing to shreds the fundamental basis of our freedoms does a whole lot to protect them, you are very sadly wrong.
If the terrorists really want to destroy our way of life, all they have to do, at this point, is sit back and hope the Bush administration gets re-elected. Ashcroft's disdain for the rule of law--his disdain even for court orders he doesn't feel like complying with--shows him to be worse than just a silly ideologue. He has no conception of justice, no respect for the ideals he claims to be defending, and is more of a threat to our American way of life than any terrorist.
And unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, the country of origin for the majority of the September 11 hijackers, as well as bin Laden himself, and probably the country of origin of most of his funding, the government of Aghanistan wasn't economically friendly to us.
The US wanted to overthrow the Taliban for a while, allegedly, in order to build an oil pipeline through Afghan territory. In comparison, we profit quite a lot from the Saudi willingness to sell oil to us.
You know, I hate to be trolled, but I get the distinct impression you actually believe what you are saying. So a few points:
In no way is this a defense of the Taliban, but it's entirely possible that they had no liking for bin Laden either. Rather, they walk a delicate line; if they help the US too much, they appear to be hypocrits and risk losing support and power. Bear in mind that the Taliban is not necessarily monolithic; the individual who supports siding with the US is putting his neck on the line. So instead, they went through the usual rigamorale of demanding evidence, though they may very well have been putting on a show and ultimately intended to turn over bin Laden.
However, they may not even have had him. If the most advanced army in the world can't find him in the caves of Afghanistan using thermal imaging, spy satellites, and god knows what other technology, how the fuck did we expect the Taliban to?
In response to your comments that bin Laden probably knew what his organization was up to, you really don't know shit. You clearly have absolutely no idea what's going on past what you read on CNN.
A British journalist who's name I unfortunately can't remember spent some time with bin Laden years back, and commented that "he's not really the sort of guy you can picture speaking into a satellite phone saying, 'initiate plan B'" (paraphrased--I apologize). He's an ideological leader, but from all accounts--including those of our own intelligence, for what it's worth--al Qaeda is much too distributed for there to be any single leader.
And, no, the fall of the Taliban is no great loss. But I doubt the people of Afghanistan are glad that there is now lawlessness outside of the cities, that warlords are fighting for control, or that we killed more civilians with our bombs and guns than were killed in America on September 11th.
Yeah. Go us.
And, please, call me an anti-American. It only shows your own ignorance. When you have to resort to name-calling and ridiculous comments--like calling the parent poster an anti-semite--you just show that you have no valid arguments and don't know enough to have an actual debate.
Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked.
What a great pickup line. I'd say that beats "You must be tired, because you've been running through my mind all night." Mind if I borrow it this weekend?
But that was pretty much the point I was trying to make. It's late, and I'm tired, so forgive me if I don't make a lot of sense.
See, his argument is really that the math doesn't matter, just because he says so. But he offers no proof, certainly no mathematical proof. And only mathematical proofs are meaningful, even if he's trying to show the math doesn't matter. It's like trying to have a logical discussion with someone who is arguing that logic doesn't matter. You could prove it logically to him and he'd say, "no, you're wrong." That't essentially what this guy is doing.
Infinity itself is only useful as a mathematical concept. If he wants to abandon math, he has to abandon his paradox as well. He simply has no valid argument here. I can hardly even argue against him, because there simply is nothing to argue against. He wants to say you can't subdivide time infinitely, but you simply can. If you want to make any assumptions about infinitey using a valid mathematical model, you can't throw out the parts you don't like. And part of our model of infinity includes the finite sum of an infinite series.
It's not that I don't support lay-involvement. But the guy's clearly a goof. And, yes, I do think I learned to sum geometric series in high-school algebra, but I could be wrong.
Merely by stating that this is "stunningly obvious", you have not proved anything. Nor, to my first impression, does "Peter Lynd's" poorly-written paper (even a nutty physicist with his head in the clouds should know how to spell "couldn't have"--not "couldn't of").
As the scientist quoted in the article commented, Lynd has no understanding of basic calculus (something I admittedly despise). Now, I am very open-minded that an outsider to the world of physics might still have valuable things to to say, but from the other occurences of this guy's name on google, he sure seems to be a hoaxster.
Newtonian physics relies on Calculus, which also relies on the idea of the instant position and instant time. So what happens when you cannot use these concepts?
Why can't we use these concepts? Have you disproven them? Or merely stated, "Hey, let's see if we can do it without those concepts?"
Zeno's paradox, to my admittedly untrained eye, leads the casual reader into assuming that the time span between Achilles being half the starting distance away and half that half away is the same. Obviously, this is false. To Achilles perspective, he is moving at a constant rate towards a non-moving tortoise; to put it another way, the time span between him being half and him being half again away from the tortoise is, by the assumption, an infinite sequence. But since it is an infinite geometric sequence, with each next element being a fraction of the first, basic algebra does indeed give us a finite sum value for it. So there truly is no paradox, calculus or no calculus.
Zeno's paradox relies on the assumption that the point of actual intersection is somehow asymptotic, that Achilles can approach the tortoise but never quite get to it. This simply is not the graph representation of their motion; both Achilles and the tortoise have constant velocity, so there is a point of intersection of the integral of their velocity; that is, the graph of their position relative to time. The paradox is merely an illogical misdirection, nothing more.
Now, if Achilles had to slow down by a certain factor each time he approached the tortoise, then you may in fact have an asymptotic relationship between the two and he would never approach the tortoise. But this is not paradoxical to our understanding of physics or time.
This isn't really the same idea. The GM idea is more like Compaq offering five different colored panel inserts for their Presario laptops. It allows a degree of cosmetic customization--be the first on your block with a red Nokia phone!--but the internals are still generic.
In the article, it sounds more like the goal is to do what Dell does--choose the feul injection system, choose the engine, choose the air intake, choose the turbocharger. Yes, it mentions a lot of cosmetics as well, like what color seats or door panels, but its the internal customization that would really interest me. The specifics aren't there in the article, but I'd hope for the ability to choose your specifics as much as someone who blows all his savings on hot-rodding his car can. Sort of like being able to order a Dell every bit as customized as the most dedicated custom builder.
Also, GM's was pure concept, without even a chance at production anywhere in the forseable future. This is fully intended to be working within a year or two.
As far as I understand, though, this is not an attempt to beat Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop simply isn't a risk to MS. It's an attempt to beat Linux in the server market. And those who would attend such a display to research options for enterprise-level, multi-thousand or million dollar investments would likely not be so easily convinced.
The point, presumably, is to "know your enemy." MS are merely researching how their competition can be used in business to figure out its strengths and weaknesses, and how to compete with it.
The suggestions that this is an attempt to create FUD seem a bit off the mark to me. I'm sure MS aren't going to be touting the benefits of Linux, but in a closed environment they have far more to gain from honest testing and competition than they do from convincing a very small number of customers, presumably devoted ones, that Linux sucks.
Were they do do that, they'd just end up looking like fools. And while marketing may help in the desktop market, those who spend large amounts of corporate money on enterprise software research it thoroughly. MS won't beat Linux in the server market just by marketing, no matter how much they spend. They know that, and have clearly decided to take Linux seriously as a competitor.
Uh, wow. Can we say "paranoia"? I think its important to remember that the RIAA see themselves as legitimate businesses being hurt by criminals and only intend to protect their business. I'm not saying they're right, but I think that's a far cry from what you posted here. Let's try to maintain some perspective here.
I don't see why the RIAA or other copyright holders would be all that concerned about private sharing networks. Security, even in regards to copyrights, is a balance between how expensive the system is and how expensive an intrusion is.
A private network can never have the volume of sharing, and hence harm to the copyright holders, that the big public networks like Kazaa have. And the cost of tracking them down is prohibitive. So I don't see this as something the RIAA needs to get worked up over any time soon. "Private" sharing, in some form or another, has been going on for decades. Analog tapes and software piracy before the days of the Internet are just two examples of tacitly-accepted piracy which was simply too low-volume to be an issue.
Now, if something like Freenet were to provide fully anonymous, public sharing with the ease-of use and pervasiveness of Kazaa, I think the RIAA would be scared.
So is it just me, or is there no option to import mail, address book, and settings from Mozilla Mail? Perhaps the files are fully compatibile and I can just copy them, but I'd rather not guess.
They briefly implemented part of the TCP/IP stack in NT3.5, if I remember right. They do not, supposedly, still use BSD code. Or at least, I don't see that notice in XP.
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, though, your comment reeks of arrogance. What you fail to understand is that, yes, people are stupid. And conversation, especially petty conversation, can seem silly. But when you talk to someone, you get the chance to understand him. As another poster pointed out, conversation isn't a very efficient medium for information exchange, but it works very well for reading someone's personality.
When I say a meaningless joke or a polite phrase, I'm often doing it to figure out other people's reactions. By seeing how people react to my behavior, I can better understand what makes them tick.
What you demonstrate isn't introversion. It's merely arrogance. I can fully sympathise with disdain for your fellow man. After all, we engage in wars--something you apparently rejoice in--we can't take care of each other, we embrace meaningless religions rather than trying to actually better ourselfs or each other. But there is an upside, as well, to each of these downsides. You aren't wise or insightful. You're just deluding yourself to stroke your own ego.
Most can admit they aren't lawyers. They just don't let that stop them ;)
But detecting irony has never been this administration's strong point.
Re: side note. It is interesting that Lincoln, thought of as such a great hero of democracy, took such liberal steps with respect to the Constitution. Were we lucky? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the ends justify the means, either, and I think the risk of losing our freedom to a "patriot" is a lot greater than that of losing it to Iraq.
Yeah, you are right. I got my terminology screwed up.
That would be my personal view, yes. That is not the view of the American Constitution or legal system.
Or, for that matter, they can be thrown into camp X-Ray for an indeterminate period of time.
That's what makes cases like this one, or that of Jose Padilla such poster-cases. The victims were American citizens denied of their rights. It doesn't matter, as I was saying in the parent post, that these people are accused terrorists. Even if they really are terrorists, they must be given a fair trial; removing someone's right to a fair trial to determine if he may be a terrorist based on the accusation that he is a terrorist is self-defeating.
Well, defeating of our legal system. Not an issue if you want to imprison people at will in a near-police state by intimidating the voters with threats of terrorist attacks.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt is the test for criminal cases. In other words, the "burden of proof" is pretty much distributed in a civil case--IANAL, though--while in a criminal case, it is up to the prosecution to prove innocence. You are not inherently presumed innocent of civil wrongdoings. But you are assumed innocent of criminal wrongdoing.
You chose a video from unknown sources in credibility over an interview with a respected--despite your ridiculous comment--news source. Yeah, way to go.
Regarding the respectability of Al Jazeera; just because it's Arab news doesn't mean it's automatically pro-Qaeda, so to speak. You know, they often get quite a bit of flak from right-wing Arab extremists for being American lackeys. Really. Which probably means they're on the right track.
Yes. I'm sure they're more anti-American than Voice of America. But you're falling for Ari Fleischer propoganda--he called Al Jazeera "all Osama, all the time"--if you allow yourself to make the simplistic assumption that, hey, they're Arab. And al Qaeda's Arab. So there's a connection.
Then again, it worked with Iraq.
In an Al Jazeera interview in October, 2001, bin Laden denied involvement in any direct planning.
"Despite this I maintain that [American] allegations [of my involvement in terrorist attacks] are false, unless it means that I am involved in inciting and goading them, which is very clear and to which I confess at all times. I was one of those who signed an edict calling for jihad and we have incited for several years now and, thank God, many brothers adhered to our calls."
I don't know where he said that the people carrying out the attacks didn't even know what they were attacking. Perhaps you can provide a link?
My impression is that he is largely just a religious leader. He calls for jihad, yes, but he does not call for what targets to be attacked, or when, or how. He did allegedly suggest the World Trade Center as a target, but this is a far cry from organizing the whole thing himself.
There's a really, really good reason it "didn't seem right." It violated his fundamental civil rights as an American citizen and a human being.
People often say, "Yeah, but he was a terrorist! He has no rights! I have no sympathy. Do you really want this guy to go to trial and risk him being set free?"
Yes. He does have rights. As an American citizen, he is innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt. He is an alleged terrorist. Quite a difference. And if you really think tearing to shreds the fundamental basis of our freedoms does a whole lot to protect them, you are very sadly wrong.
If the terrorists really want to destroy our way of life, all they have to do, at this point, is sit back and hope the Bush administration gets re-elected. Ashcroft's disdain for the rule of law--his disdain even for court orders he doesn't feel like complying with--shows him to be worse than just a silly ideologue. He has no conception of justice, no respect for the ideals he claims to be defending, and is more of a threat to our American way of life than any terrorist.
The US wanted to overthrow the Taliban for a while, allegedly, in order to build an oil pipeline through Afghan territory. In comparison, we profit quite a lot from the Saudi willingness to sell oil to us.
Things aren't always what they seem.
In no way is this a defense of the Taliban, but it's entirely possible that they had no liking for bin Laden either. Rather, they walk a delicate line; if they help the US too much, they appear to be hypocrits and risk losing support and power. Bear in mind that the Taliban is not necessarily monolithic; the individual who supports siding with the US is putting his neck on the line. So instead, they went through the usual rigamorale of demanding evidence, though they may very well have been putting on a show and ultimately intended to turn over bin Laden. However, they may not even have had him. If the most advanced army in the world can't find him in the caves of Afghanistan using thermal imaging, spy satellites, and god knows what other technology, how the fuck did we expect the Taliban to?
In response to your comments that bin Laden probably knew what his organization was up to, you really don't know shit. You clearly have absolutely no idea what's going on past what you read on CNN.
A British journalist who's name I unfortunately can't remember spent some time with bin Laden years back, and commented that "he's not really the sort of guy you can picture speaking into a satellite phone saying, 'initiate plan B'" (paraphrased--I apologize). He's an ideological leader, but from all accounts--including those of our own intelligence, for what it's worth--al Qaeda is much too distributed for there to be any single leader.
And, no, the fall of the Taliban is no great loss. But I doubt the people of Afghanistan are glad that there is now lawlessness outside of the cities, that warlords are fighting for control, or that we killed more civilians with our bombs and guns than were killed in America on September 11th.
Yeah. Go us.
And, please, call me an anti-American. It only shows your own ignorance. When you have to resort to name-calling and ridiculous comments--like calling the parent poster an anti-semite--you just show that you have no valid arguments and don't know enough to have an actual debate.
See, but we all know that movie would have done fine if J-Lo and Affleck were to die horrible, gruesome deaths.
What a great pickup line. I'd say that beats "You must be tired, because you've been running through my mind all night." Mind if I borrow it this weekend?
A peice of artwork? For what? If it's commercial use, yes, you need permission, but if it's purely artistic, I don't believe you do.
See, his argument is really that the math doesn't matter, just because he says so. But he offers no proof, certainly no mathematical proof. And only mathematical proofs are meaningful, even if he's trying to show the math doesn't matter. It's like trying to have a logical discussion with someone who is arguing that logic doesn't matter. You could prove it logically to him and he'd say, "no, you're wrong." That't essentially what this guy is doing.
Infinity itself is only useful as a mathematical concept. If he wants to abandon math, he has to abandon his paradox as well. He simply has no valid argument here. I can hardly even argue against him, because there simply is nothing to argue against. He wants to say you can't subdivide time infinitely, but you simply can. If you want to make any assumptions about infinitey using a valid mathematical model, you can't throw out the parts you don't like. And part of our model of infinity includes the finite sum of an infinite series.
It's not that I don't support lay-involvement. But the guy's clearly a goof. And, yes, I do think I learned to sum geometric series in high-school algebra, but I could be wrong.
As the scientist quoted in the article commented, Lynd has no understanding of basic calculus (something I admittedly despise). Now, I am very open-minded that an outsider to the world of physics might still have valuable things to to say, but from the other occurences of this guy's name on google, he sure seems to be a hoaxster.
Newtonian physics relies on Calculus, which also relies on the idea of the instant position and instant time. So what happens when you cannot use these concepts?
Why can't we use these concepts? Have you disproven them? Or merely stated, "Hey, let's see if we can do it without those concepts?"
Zeno's paradox, to my admittedly untrained eye, leads the casual reader into assuming that the time span between Achilles being half the starting distance away and half that half away is the same. Obviously, this is false. To Achilles perspective, he is moving at a constant rate towards a non-moving tortoise; to put it another way, the time span between him being half and him being half again away from the tortoise is, by the assumption, an infinite sequence. But since it is an infinite geometric sequence, with each next element being a fraction of the first, basic algebra does indeed give us a finite sum value for it. So there truly is no paradox, calculus or no calculus.
Zeno's paradox relies on the assumption that the point of actual intersection is somehow asymptotic, that Achilles can approach the tortoise but never quite get to it. This simply is not the graph representation of their motion; both Achilles and the tortoise have constant velocity, so there is a point of intersection of the integral of their velocity; that is, the graph of their position relative to time. The paradox is merely an illogical misdirection, nothing more.
Now, if Achilles had to slow down by a certain factor each time he approached the tortoise, then you may in fact have an asymptotic relationship between the two and he would never approach the tortoise. But this is not paradoxical to our understanding of physics or time.
In the article, it sounds more like the goal is to do what Dell does--choose the feul injection system, choose the engine, choose the air intake, choose the turbocharger. Yes, it mentions a lot of cosmetics as well, like what color seats or door panels, but its the internal customization that would really interest me. The specifics aren't there in the article, but I'd hope for the ability to choose your specifics as much as someone who blows all his savings on hot-rodding his car can. Sort of like being able to order a Dell every bit as customized as the most dedicated custom builder.
Also, GM's was pure concept, without even a chance at production anywhere in the forseable future. This is fully intended to be working within a year or two.
As far as I understand, though, this is not an attempt to beat Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop simply isn't a risk to MS. It's an attempt to beat Linux in the server market. And those who would attend such a display to research options for enterprise-level, multi-thousand or million dollar investments would likely not be so easily convinced.
The suggestions that this is an attempt to create FUD seem a bit off the mark to me. I'm sure MS aren't going to be touting the benefits of Linux, but in a closed environment they have far more to gain from honest testing and competition than they do from convincing a very small number of customers, presumably devoted ones, that Linux sucks.
Were they do do that, they'd just end up looking like fools. And while marketing may help in the desktop market, those who spend large amounts of corporate money on enterprise software research it thoroughly. MS won't beat Linux in the server market just by marketing, no matter how much they spend. They know that, and have clearly decided to take Linux seriously as a competitor.
Uh, wow. Can we say "paranoia"? I think its important to remember that the RIAA see themselves as legitimate businesses being hurt by criminals and only intend to protect their business. I'm not saying they're right, but I think that's a far cry from what you posted here. Let's try to maintain some perspective here.
A private network can never have the volume of sharing, and hence harm to the copyright holders, that the big public networks like Kazaa have. And the cost of tracking them down is prohibitive. So I don't see this as something the RIAA needs to get worked up over any time soon. "Private" sharing, in some form or another, has been going on for decades. Analog tapes and software piracy before the days of the Internet are just two examples of tacitly-accepted piracy which was simply too low-volume to be an issue.
Now, if something like Freenet were to provide fully anonymous, public sharing with the ease-of use and pervasiveness of Kazaa, I think the RIAA would be scared.
So is it just me, or is there no option to import mail, address book, and settings from Mozilla Mail? Perhaps the files are fully compatibile and I can just copy them, but I'd rather not guess.
They briefly implemented part of the TCP/IP stack in NT3.5, if I remember right. They do not, supposedly, still use BSD code. Or at least, I don't see that notice in XP.