Preaching, but not forcing. That's what separates people like Stallman from fascists like the MPAA and RIAA. RMS just says "here's a better way". The RIAA says "we've bought a new law that'll fix you good!" You see the difference? "Preaching" does not involve bribing the US government to change the law in your favour. Hence, there's nothing to worry about. Do you understand now? Do you realize yet why there's no way for RMS to lead us into an Orwellian nightmare from there is no escape?
Technically then, arms includes things like shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, grenades, fully automatic assault weapons, maybe a few of a the lighter machine guns, napalm flamethrowers, and whatnot. Unless you genuinely belive that a rifle's ability to launch a bullet entirely derives from the wielder's energy.
Do you really believe that the weight, and ability to operate by hand, are enough to mean that the weapon is acceptable for general ownership?
So you're scared of your neighbour buying heavy water, when the local Wal-Mart sells auto-action rifles and handguns? Man, are YOU stupid. That's some serious idiocy of the type you typically only see in people from the United... oh wait, NOW it all makes sense. An American, I should have known. The globe's most irrational cowards.
Terrorism dark age? Try a fascism dark-age. America has had one foreign-based terrorist attack, which killed 0.1% the number of people who have had their lives destroyed by the government for owning a plant that makes people happy for a few hours. Every terrorism-related death on American soil EVER, still doesn't add up to the number of people who have been accidentally killed by excessive police force over the years, nor does it rival the number of people unjustly sentenced to death because of their race and/or class. Terrorism is a mouse among men. America's authoritarian, anti-social government policies are the giant.
I think there's some confusion here over the difference between the trickle-down effect, and trickle-down economics. The former is simply the totally valid theory that sooner or later, any money a rich person has will leave them. The latter is the theory that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it's better to have rich people hoarding wealth and spending a few bucks on platinum caviar scoops than to tax some of it and spend that money on police officers or flu shots, despite the fact that both of those things benefit a lot of people while platinum caviar scoops benefit only their owners.
Everyone believes that the trickle-down effect exists. Only retards believe that trickle-down economics is anything other than a way to shift a society's tax burden away from the people who can most afford it, to the people who can least afford it. Any any government that uses taxation to redistribute wealth, rather than simple taxing the minimum amount necessary to fund its programs, is a government in desperate need of replacement.
Of course taxation is a terrible way to redistribute wealth. The fact that relying on the trickle-down effect is only the second-worst way is hardly a stellar defence. Intelligent governments place the tax burden on those that can most afford it. Only hopelessly corrupt governments place the tax burden on those who can least afford it.
On average, ANY trade made by ANYONE redistributes wealth. Taxation isn't about redistributing wealth (well, maybe in the bizarre and lunatic tax system of the US it is...), it's about funding social programs that the electorate consider necessary -- like the military, police forces, fire departments. No one ever says "lets hire more cops -- wealth isn't being redistributed enough". Try thinking next time, jackass.
Of course, maybe what you meant to say is that a trade made by a right individual redistributes more wealth on average than a trade by a poor individual -- an equally worthless claim given that poor individuals outnumber rich individuals by about a hundred-thousand to one, and a rich person's trades simply aren't a hundred-thousand times larger or more plentiful than a poor person's. The money that poor people spend really does represent the bulk of all private economic transactions taking place.
And for your strange final claim, you really believe that a trade made by a rich individual is more efficient than "a more competitive marketplace"? I'm just going to write off that strange comparison to sleep deprivation or a mild delerium caused by a too-tight-necktie.
It's an ideal, yes, and few can ever approach it even in their capacity as scientists. But at least they try. Religious people just assume that the bible must be correct, and never question that. The bible hasn't changed in over a millenia and half, and anyone who suggests revision is considered a heretic. Scientific theories get revised yearly. The bible has consistently failed to match reality (how many times have Christians expected the apocalypse now? Why does all geological and physical evidence contradict the occurrence of a great flood? Why does it get the names of Roman and Egyptian leaders wrong?), whereas science has consistently modelled reality quite well (just try using your microwave or computer for proof of how well science models reality).
Aside, my teacher's saying is quite true -- individual scientists often wont give up their theories, but scientists collectively are extraordinarily good at ditching their bad ideas over time. You can rant and rave about how they "latch onto beliefs", but the evidence contradicts you: we've ditched countless bad versions of Darwinism, Aristotelian physics, the Bohr model of the atom, and even General Relativity is getting hacked at. What bad ideas has religion ditched? Any? Even religious war is making a comeback, thanks America's Pope-King, Bush the Second (who already claims that God speaks through him...)
Let me make it very simple for you: YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE FSF'S SOFTWARE! Write your own, use BSD, or pay for Windows. You have NO RIGHT to tell the FSF how to license ITS software. No one has to "stop" RMS -- you just have to stop using his works. If you genuinely can't survive without the FSF version of emacs, you're probably doomed anyway.
It makes a small number of wealthy investors slightly more wealthy. And if you buy into "trickle-down-economics", that should be enough to make everyone's life better. But it takes about ten seconds of grade-school level mathematics to show that trickle-down economics doesn't work (which is about what you would expect from an economic theory espoused by a guy who was riddled with Alzheimer's), so....
Alright, name ONE album, or even just one song, that hasn't been pirated. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of banks that haven't been robbed. Safes: 1, Protected-AAC: 0. So your analogy ends up being both stupid and inane. Nice attempt though.
DRM has never prevented any piracy, ever. Every videogame has been released onto file-sharing networks, every song, every movie. What DRM has done is make life very unpleasant for legitimate customers, and cause them to envy their media-downloading brethren who have no such problems. DRM is not about piracy and never has been -- DRM is about making customers buy the same content repeatedly, once for each device they want to use that conent on. Bought a new computer? Sorry, you have to re-purchase your music. Swapped out your CPU? Sorry, you need to buy a new copy of Windows CE (chump edition).
If you don't like it, just go use software that isn't licensed under the GPL. They aren't forcing anything onto anyone, unlike their peers in the corporate world who are having laws rewritten willy-nilly.
Funny how that line of thinking only ever seems to apply to academics. When it comes to sports, schools are still happy to parade the football team in front of everyone to show off how much "better" they are than the other students. Even the school's football team happened to be the worst in the entire province, as it was in the case of my high school.
Well, if you had done a BSc in math, physics, Compsci (at some schools), or Engineering, and had worked your way through the nitty gritty of the theory behind the FFT, wouldn't you be hungry for the chance to finally put it to some use? Not a particularly important use, but still. For every person who actually works with the FFT, there are a hundred more who studied it and shortened their life by missing sleep so that they could study for the quiz on it.
I bet you'd see the same thing if there were an article about mergesort (mergesort for disk-drives and tape-drives is a "fascinating" subject), or about... whatever it is that chemists study.
What is newsworthy is that this is a shameless attempt to secularize mathematics. It's right in the name -- Fast Fourier Transformation. That's idolatry. What can a man know about signals that God hasn't already made clear in the Word? Come to our website, and you can learn all about Intelligent Factoring, which is on much sounder mathematical grounds because it develops entirely from biblical principles.
1.) Anthrax only needs to be aerosolized if you intend to distribute it by air. The regulard kind can certainly infect people through skin-contact, accidental ingestion, scratches, etc. It's just a bit more work to get it to the potential recipient. After all, how would anyone have known that anthrax was even dangerous if it hadn't been killing people long before militaries began aerosolizing it?
2.) Modern nuclear weapons require far, far more than just enriched uranium. They require advanced bomb designs that the US and the USSR have never declassified, they require tritium or deuterium, and they require incredibly sophisticated engineering to produce. The bomb that your neighbour makes in his garage will probably not even match the lethality of either of the two bombs dropped in WW2.
3.) Scale? I'd call the millions of people dead as a result of the automobile a pretty large scale. Cars are meant to be used, but who actually uses an atom bomb? Here in the real world (ie: not the deranged bogeyman world of fear and cowardice that Americans live in), automobiles really do kill more people, and continue killing people, in the hundreds of thousands every year. Meanwhile, nuke just sit in stockpiles deteriorating. So yes, I trivialize the danger the represent, because its the same type of danger as killer bees, escalator accidents, and comet-strikes. That is, the type of danger that irrational people fear but that never actually affects more than a handful of people at the MOST.
Yuck, don't remind me. The journalist thing is an unusually lame move... I'm not found of modern conservatives, and I thought I expected the worst from them. And yet Harper has still managed to underwhelm. Maybe he and Bush can get together and have a little "I'm the Decider" party, while they ceremonially burn copies of their respective constitutions and swoon over pictures of Franco and Mussolini.
Well, the US constitution really doesn't make any exceptions about what kind of arms that citizens can own. And after all, the British -- America's traditional enemeies -- have nukes of their own. Isn't it about time that the average Joe six-pack had access to nuclear arms? Even just a little bunker-buster would be nice, in case he needs something to take with him when he travels, or goes hunting for Leviathan.
I like to call this the "Ninja Effect". Whenever anything is discussed online, a bunch of the participants will begin claiming to have various exotic credentials. The claim to being a ninja is a particularly notable example, as are other martial arts. Any type of scientist you can think of, there are a thirty guys in the conversation who are leading experts in the field. There are usually a few millionaire playboys who live in small towns and sleep with every woman in their area code. Oh, and nearly everyone was a Navy SEAL (or comparable special forces operative from their own country) at some point in their life.
The ninja effect! A source of endless Internet hilarity.
The technology to make weapons that are much more dangerous than gun-nukes are already available to pretty much anyone. Anthrax practically breeds itself. And by "practically" I mean "literally". A variety of super-lethal chemical agents can be synthesized with stuff from your local grocery store, and made into weapons using stuff from your local hardware store. A pack of matches and a forest during the summer can net you a firestorm that will destroy pretty much anything. I could go on and on. Besides, why worry about nukes when the common automobile kills more people per year than all nuclear weapons combined ever have? I'd worry more about the proliferation of the horseless carriage than about the proliferation of uranium.
That is possibly the most hilarious irony of the entire nuclear "debate". If we simply burned the by-products of nuclear power plants, it would still dump less radioactive material into the atmosphere than if a comparable amount of power had been derived by burning coal. Coal fuel-cells might be able to do better -- at least the waste could be put into drums where people could freak out about what to do with it)... but still.
It's not just republicans, it's all bad-government conservatives. What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"? Nowadays, they fuck up otherwise successfull programs, DON'T lower taxes, create deficits spending money on things that don't work, and lie constantly. Modern conservatives can't even come up with good lies. At least guys like Nixon made it hard to be sure exactly what was going on. You knew he was full of shit, but what kind of shit? Bush just relies on the fact that most Americans are as almost gutless as he is, and are too cowardly to doubt anything. Or my own "leader", Stephen Harper, who tells lies that are contradicted (often within hours) by undeniable evidence. At least Paul Martin's lies left you confused and uncertain about reality... Harper's just embarass us all.
I'd be satisfied that god existed if you could arrange for Pi to change by praying. That would be pretty supernatural, since there is absolutely no room in mathematics for Pi to change, or for prayer to affect the properties of the universe.
It's entirely reasonable to call a belief "anti-science" if it is fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of science. The belief that the bible is accurate, especially despite vast evidence to the contrary, runs contrary to the need for scientists to remain critical of every assumption. Good scientists start questioning their assumptions as soon as there is ANY evidence contradicting them. A group that endorses a belief that is incompatible with the tenets of science is an anti-science group (especially if they spend all their time attacking the work of scientists and preaching the truth of ludicrous stories). By way of analogy, wouldn't you agree that I'm "anti-religious" if I claim that worship of any kind is a sin? Well, maybe not anti-religious since Buddhism doesn't require any worship whatsoever. But at least anti-christian. It's not an ad-hominem attack, since I really am encouraging an attitude that opposes christianity.
The problem here is that you either don't understand science and it's basis in critical thinking, or are deliberating trying to pass off blind zealotry as rational thought.
Were not talking about forcing kids to become welders, or denying them the right to learn anything that wont directly aid their careers. Were talking about not forcing them to take courses that wont help them. If welder-kid wants to take an english literature course, more power to him. If welder-kid hates lit and will never read anything that isn't a tv guide, why are we forcing him to analyze the details of Hamlet for 8 months?
I agree that a streamed education system CAN be a terrible, monstrous way of pigeon-holing people and forcing them into lives that they may not want. But a good streamed education system helps students receive exactly the education they want. After all, isn't that precisely why universities and colleges are totally streamed? People taking pre-law and people taking accounting are in completely different classes for the most part, even though an introduction to law would probably benefit many accountants, and most lawyers will benefit greatly from knowing how to keep their books balanced. And if they want, the students in those programs can take elective courses to learn those things. That's the beauty of a streamed system -- it provides specialization, with as much generalization as one has a taste for.
But you DON'T use science. Unless you can say the words "the bible may be wrong", you're not a scientist, because scientists question the accuracy of EVERYTHING. On the very first day of my first science class in college, my professor said that every scientific theory is wrong. We'll always find a flaw, and replace the theory with a better one. If you can't acknowledge the possibility of replacing your assumptions (which are the bible) with better ones (say... the Quran? Maybe it's claims about the cosmic background radiation are more accurate than the bible's?:P ), then you are not a scientist. Read that again: YOU ARE NOT A SCIENTIST. Scientists question everything and are prepared to revise any and all theories. Religious zealots never question their myths, and never revise their stance. They are the opposite of scientists.
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Preaching, but not forcing. That's what separates people like Stallman from fascists like the MPAA and RIAA. RMS just says "here's a better way". The RIAA says "we've bought a new law that'll fix you good!" You see the difference? "Preaching" does not involve bribing the US government to change the law in your favour. Hence, there's nothing to worry about. Do you understand now? Do you realize yet why there's no way for RMS to lead us into an Orwellian nightmare from there is no escape?
Do you really believe that the weight, and ability to operate by hand, are enough to mean that the weapon is acceptable for general ownership?
So you're scared of your neighbour buying heavy water, when the local Wal-Mart sells auto-action rifles and handguns? Man, are YOU stupid. That's some serious idiocy of the type you typically only see in people from the United... oh wait, NOW it all makes sense. An American, I should have known. The globe's most irrational cowards.
Terrorism dark age? Try a fascism dark-age. America has had one foreign-based terrorist attack, which killed 0.1% the number of people who have had their lives destroyed by the government for owning a plant that makes people happy for a few hours. Every terrorism-related death on American soil EVER, still doesn't add up to the number of people who have been accidentally killed by excessive police force over the years, nor does it rival the number of people unjustly sentenced to death because of their race and/or class. Terrorism is a mouse among men. America's authoritarian, anti-social government policies are the giant.
Everyone believes that the trickle-down effect exists. Only retards believe that trickle-down economics is anything other than a way to shift a society's tax burden away from the people who can most afford it, to the people who can least afford it. Any any government that uses taxation to redistribute wealth, rather than simple taxing the minimum amount necessary to fund its programs, is a government in desperate need of replacement.
Of course taxation is a terrible way to redistribute wealth. The fact that relying on the trickle-down effect is only the second-worst way is hardly a stellar defence. Intelligent governments place the tax burden on those that can most afford it. Only hopelessly corrupt governments place the tax burden on those who can least afford it.
Of course, maybe what you meant to say is that a trade made by a right individual redistributes more wealth on average than a trade by a poor individual -- an equally worthless claim given that poor individuals outnumber rich individuals by about a hundred-thousand to one, and a rich person's trades simply aren't a hundred-thousand times larger or more plentiful than a poor person's. The money that poor people spend really does represent the bulk of all private economic transactions taking place.
And for your strange final claim, you really believe that a trade made by a rich individual is more efficient than "a more competitive marketplace"? I'm just going to write off that strange comparison to sleep deprivation or a mild delerium caused by a too-tight-necktie.
Aside, my teacher's saying is quite true -- individual scientists often wont give up their theories, but scientists collectively are extraordinarily good at ditching their bad ideas over time. You can rant and rave about how they "latch onto beliefs", but the evidence contradicts you: we've ditched countless bad versions of Darwinism, Aristotelian physics, the Bohr model of the atom, and even General Relativity is getting hacked at. What bad ideas has religion ditched? Any? Even religious war is making a comeback, thanks America's Pope-King, Bush the Second (who already claims that God speaks through him...)
Let me make it very simple for you: YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE FSF'S SOFTWARE! Write your own, use BSD, or pay for Windows. You have NO RIGHT to tell the FSF how to license ITS software. No one has to "stop" RMS -- you just have to stop using his works. If you genuinely can't survive without the FSF version of emacs, you're probably doomed anyway.
It makes a small number of wealthy investors slightly more wealthy. And if you buy into "trickle-down-economics", that should be enough to make everyone's life better. But it takes about ten seconds of grade-school level mathematics to show that trickle-down economics doesn't work (which is about what you would expect from an economic theory espoused by a guy who was riddled with Alzheimer's), so....
DRM has never prevented any piracy, ever. Every videogame has been released onto file-sharing networks, every song, every movie. What DRM has done is make life very unpleasant for legitimate customers, and cause them to envy their media-downloading brethren who have no such problems. DRM is not about piracy and never has been -- DRM is about making customers buy the same content repeatedly, once for each device they want to use that conent on. Bought a new computer? Sorry, you have to re-purchase your music. Swapped out your CPU? Sorry, you need to buy a new copy of Windows CE (chump edition).
If you don't like it, just go use software that isn't licensed under the GPL. They aren't forcing anything onto anyone, unlike their peers in the corporate world who are having laws rewritten willy-nilly.
Funny how that line of thinking only ever seems to apply to academics. When it comes to sports, schools are still happy to parade the football team in front of everyone to show off how much "better" they are than the other students. Even the school's football team happened to be the worst in the entire province, as it was in the case of my high school.
I bet you'd see the same thing if there were an article about mergesort (mergesort for disk-drives and tape-drives is a "fascinating" subject), or about ... whatever it is that chemists study.
What is newsworthy is that this is a shameless attempt to secularize mathematics. It's right in the name -- Fast Fourier Transformation. That's idolatry. What can a man know about signals that God hasn't already made clear in the Word? Come to our website, and you can learn all about Intelligent Factoring, which is on much sounder mathematical grounds because it develops entirely from biblical principles.
1.) Anthrax only needs to be aerosolized if you intend to distribute it by air. The regulard kind can certainly infect people through skin-contact, accidental ingestion, scratches, etc. It's just a bit more work to get it to the potential recipient. After all, how would anyone have known that anthrax was even dangerous if it hadn't been killing people long before militaries began aerosolizing it? 2.) Modern nuclear weapons require far, far more than just enriched uranium. They require advanced bomb designs that the US and the USSR have never declassified, they require tritium or deuterium, and they require incredibly sophisticated engineering to produce. The bomb that your neighbour makes in his garage will probably not even match the lethality of either of the two bombs dropped in WW2. 3.) Scale? I'd call the millions of people dead as a result of the automobile a pretty large scale. Cars are meant to be used, but who actually uses an atom bomb? Here in the real world (ie: not the deranged bogeyman world of fear and cowardice that Americans live in), automobiles really do kill more people, and continue killing people, in the hundreds of thousands every year. Meanwhile, nuke just sit in stockpiles deteriorating. So yes, I trivialize the danger the represent, because its the same type of danger as killer bees, escalator accidents, and comet-strikes. That is, the type of danger that irrational people fear but that never actually affects more than a handful of people at the MOST.
Yuck, don't remind me. The journalist thing is an unusually lame move... I'm not found of modern conservatives, and I thought I expected the worst from them. And yet Harper has still managed to underwhelm. Maybe he and Bush can get together and have a little "I'm the Decider" party, while they ceremonially burn copies of their respective constitutions and swoon over pictures of Franco and Mussolini.
Your bitterness is mighty. :)
Well, the US constitution really doesn't make any exceptions about what kind of arms that citizens can own. And after all, the British -- America's traditional enemeies -- have nukes of their own. Isn't it about time that the average Joe six-pack had access to nuclear arms? Even just a little bunker-buster would be nice, in case he needs something to take with him when he travels, or goes hunting for Leviathan.
The ninja effect! A source of endless Internet hilarity.
The technology to make weapons that are much more dangerous than gun-nukes are already available to pretty much anyone. Anthrax practically breeds itself. And by "practically" I mean "literally". A variety of super-lethal chemical agents can be synthesized with stuff from your local grocery store, and made into weapons using stuff from your local hardware store. A pack of matches and a forest during the summer can net you a firestorm that will destroy pretty much anything. I could go on and on. Besides, why worry about nukes when the common automobile kills more people per year than all nuclear weapons combined ever have? I'd worry more about the proliferation of the horseless carriage than about the proliferation of uranium.
That is possibly the most hilarious irony of the entire nuclear "debate". If we simply burned the by-products of nuclear power plants, it would still dump less radioactive material into the atmosphere than if a comparable amount of power had been derived by burning coal. Coal fuel-cells might be able to do better -- at least the waste could be put into drums where people could freak out about what to do with it)... but still.
It's not just republicans, it's all bad-government conservatives. What happened to the days when conservatives had the balls to just say "centralism sucks, so we're cancelling these programs and lowering taxs"? Nowadays, they fuck up otherwise successfull programs, DON'T lower taxes, create deficits spending money on things that don't work, and lie constantly. Modern conservatives can't even come up with good lies. At least guys like Nixon made it hard to be sure exactly what was going on. You knew he was full of shit, but what kind of shit? Bush just relies on the fact that most Americans are as almost gutless as he is, and are too cowardly to doubt anything. Or my own "leader", Stephen Harper, who tells lies that are contradicted (often within hours) by undeniable evidence. At least Paul Martin's lies left you confused and uncertain about reality... Harper's just embarass us all.
It's entirely reasonable to call a belief "anti-science" if it is fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of science. The belief that the bible is accurate, especially despite vast evidence to the contrary, runs contrary to the need for scientists to remain critical of every assumption. Good scientists start questioning their assumptions as soon as there is ANY evidence contradicting them. A group that endorses a belief that is incompatible with the tenets of science is an anti-science group (especially if they spend all their time attacking the work of scientists and preaching the truth of ludicrous stories). By way of analogy, wouldn't you agree that I'm "anti-religious" if I claim that worship of any kind is a sin? Well, maybe not anti-religious since Buddhism doesn't require any worship whatsoever. But at least anti-christian. It's not an ad-hominem attack, since I really am encouraging an attitude that opposes christianity.
The problem here is that you either don't understand science and it's basis in critical thinking, or are deliberating trying to pass off blind zealotry as rational thought.
I agree that a streamed education system CAN be a terrible, monstrous way of pigeon-holing people and forcing them into lives that they may not want. But a good streamed education system helps students receive exactly the education they want. After all, isn't that precisely why universities and colleges are totally streamed? People taking pre-law and people taking accounting are in completely different classes for the most part, even though an introduction to law would probably benefit many accountants, and most lawyers will benefit greatly from knowing how to keep their books balanced. And if they want, the students in those programs can take elective courses to learn those things. That's the beauty of a streamed system -- it provides specialization, with as much generalization as one has a taste for.
But you DON'T use science. Unless you can say the words "the bible may be wrong", you're not a scientist, because scientists question the accuracy of EVERYTHING. On the very first day of my first science class in college, my professor said that every scientific theory is wrong. We'll always find a flaw, and replace the theory with a better one. If you can't acknowledge the possibility of replacing your assumptions (which are the bible) with better ones (say... the Quran? Maybe it's claims about the cosmic background radiation are more accurate than the bible's? :P ), then you are not a scientist. Read that again: YOU ARE NOT A SCIENTIST. Scientists question everything and are prepared to revise any and all theories. Religious zealots never question their myths, and never revise their stance. They are the opposite of scientists.