Any other ideas? Prestige. Browser usage is measured and published by popular web sites and so is a high-visibility metric for the popularity of the different companies. If you like to think of yourself as a big name in the industry you don't want to not be on these lists at all, even if that means you're going to be towards the bottom of them. It makes you one of the players.
So sure murder, theft, violence are all bad for society and therefore "wrong". Violence isn't necessarily bad for society, only certain forms of violence in certain contexts are considered bad and are therefore illegal. Most civilized nations allow a number of full contact sports, for instance, even deliberately harmful ones (boxing) and only a very small minority keeps claiming that this is a bad thing. Moreover, the state tends to use direct violence to maintain its authority (police actions, etc.) and this is also not generally considered a bad thing.
As for murder and theft, being worded in the context of being illegal they clearly are considered bad and therefore made illegal. Worded as "killing" and "taking someone's property away", however, they are/not/ necessarily considered bad for society. Indeed, there are strong lobby groups claiming that mercy killing can be a good thing and a number of (otherwise) civilized countries still practice capital punishment, presumably because they think that doing so is in fact/good/ for society. Most nations also practice some form of eminent domain so taking people's property away is also not universally considered a "bad" thing.
"Digital files cost nothing", perhaps to distribute, but not to produce the content. If a movie cost $50 million to produce, then it definitely isn't 'free' even as a download. Just because the universe had to spend several billion years to come up with trees does not mean that leaves are incredibly valuable. They are not.
If you really think it is so totally ineffective, I would ask why so many top secret jobs require it. Mostly because there's no shortage of superstitious people in government. In another era they would use crystal balls but in this day and age, the polygraph is where it's at.
This probably stems from the fundamentally impossible nature of the problem case: "determine if this person is to be trusted". Humans and their ancestors have spent the last several million years in an evolutionary and cultural power struggle of trying to hide their own true motivations and also trying to sense those of others. We remain at a stalemate and when facing such an intractable problem, there is a strong tendency to grasp at the full-of-promises-and-screw-reality type "solutions" presented by varying divining methods such as the polygraph.
Of course, the beauty of most of these divining methods is that if the operator is good enough at cold reading/and/ if you can get the subject to actually believe in your magic, then you can even make it work pretty well. But those are pretty serious "if"s.
Oh yes, a war for oil. And how great has that worked out? Considering that oil is at record highs, I don't think that it was a "war for oil" because had it been a "war for oil" we would have more oil. Hey, they didn't say it was a competently planned war for oil. One could say that it was a war for oil in much the same way that WW1 was a war to end all wars.
Of course, if you allow yourself to anthropomorphize oil, I am quite sure the Oil is happy with being as valuable as it is so in this sense it may have been a war for Oil.
As an European, I might not see the subtle differences between Democrats and Republicans, but to my eyes, they look so similar I can't really see the choice. Republicans tend to increase the national debt while democrats tend to reduce it.
It reminds me of the effect it had on Japan when they won Pearl Harbor in WWII. Right after they won the battle, they realised they woke the sleeping giant. They knew this well enough beforehand. Admiral Yamamoto is known to have said, on several occasions, that "I can run wild for six months... after that, I have no expectation of success." (quote from wikipedia)
That the Japenese government failed to properly capitalize on this six month head start is a different matter entirely. They took a calculated gamble and they lost. This can happen to the Greatest of Powers.
Sony et al, however, appear to have absolutely no realization of how much pain they are currently setting themselves up for further down the line. This happens when your leaders are too far removed from reality to be able to make rational decisions. And when your shareholders repeatedly fail to recognize this state of affairs.
Further, if we're talking hundreds of years, we start to get into the territory of solar system colonisation and mind uploads. Then again, perhaps mind uploads/are/ the Great Filter. If being uploaded is sufficiently beneficial for some reason or other, everyone will be doing it. But perhaps being a machine gradually strips away an individual's sense of self preservation, its will to "live" and eventually people just start turning themselves off out of sheer apathy and the entire civilization slowly peters out with not so much as a whimper:-)
I wonder how many Americans would agree that the quote-unquote "intellectual elite" should run the country. You do realize that when you type something like this you don't have to actually say "quote-unquote". Surely you mean quote-unquote "You do realize that when you type something like this you don't have to actually say quote-unquote "quote-unquote"."?:-)
Fake drugs, aircraft and machine parts, and to a lesser extent IT infrastructure components, are all serious issues. No, they are not. This is another red herring. You touch upon the real issue when you continue with:
But there is a huge difference between a counterfeit drug that's actually poison, and (...) but I would continue that sentence with "(...) a counterfeit drug that actually works as advertised."
A drug that claims to be Viagra but is actually manufactured by someone other than the trademark holder for the mark "Viagra" is not a threat to anyone but the trademark holder/so long as/ it contains the same stuff that "real" Viagra does.
Therefore, what we need is/not/ a new set of laws to outlaw "counterfeit" products nor do we need a government crackdown on "counterfeit" products, what we need is a set of laws to outlaw the sale of poison masquerading as medicine. Funnily enough, I think that is actually already illegal. I don't know what's holding the crackdown back though.
that open source is saving those vendors' customers $60 billion. Or, in other words, it's a sixty billion dollar efficiency gain for the rest of the economy.
Which isn't half bad coming from an industry that is still trying to find its feet.
But when it's safer to drop a bomb, or rather too dangerous to send the Marines into a high-value target's apartment block at 3AM, we drop the bomb and accept the "collateral damage" that comes along with it.
This was the case in WWII and it's still the case today. The primary difference between WW2 and modern wars is that in WW2, they would have had to carpet bomb the entire neighbourhood (or the entire town) in order to have a decent chance of taking out that one building while as today, only the one building needs to go. It may still be nasty, but it is certainly/better/ even if it is not/good/.
(Granted, they did use Mosquito aircraft for strategic precision bombing in WW2, but these were very difficult high-risk missions and generally only used to reduce collateral damage in attacks against very important targets in friendly, occupied countries.)
If God is omniscient, then he knows what I am about to do and everything I will do in my life. If he knows that, than I can't truly have free will. There is no conflict between predestination and free will. Even if I could predict with absolute certainty how you would act in any given situation, that still does not mean that it is I (or anyone else) who is making that decision for you - the decision is still yours. That your decision is predictable is just an indication that you are, indeed, free to act according to your nature rather than forced to act randomly.
As an example, if I know that you are seriously hydrophobic I can know with 100% certainty that given the choice of swimming across a canal and taking the bridge, you are always going to use the bridge. You are this predictable exactly because you/are/ free to choose the mode of crossing you find the most desirable (i.e. you are acting according to your nature).
(Of course, it doesn't really help matters that we have yet to come up with a generally acceptable definition of "free will" so any discussion of this topic is necessarily confusing and prone to misunderstandings.)
An alternative way to convince oneself of the 2/3 probability (this only really holds if goats have no value for you, but let's humor me and assume that for now) is as follows:
1. Monty tells you that behind one of the doors is a car and behind the two others are goats (which have no value to you and so might as well not be there in the first place). 2. Monty asks you to choose a door. You do so. 3. Monty then tells you that if you stay with the door that you chose, you will be given whatever is behind it but that if you switch, you will get the prizes behind both the two remaining doors.
Switching therefore (rather intuitively) gives you/two/ chances at the car rather than just one. Again, we assume that you will just donate any goats received to charity.
The above is an equivalent scenario to the original one because step (3) is functionally equivalent to Monty removing the door that is known not to contain anything of value.
Of course, if you're a goat farmer, things may be different.
For example, technically, I should have the right to own a nuclear bomb. It's an arm. I should have the right to bear it. Right? The US Constitution certainly gives you this right. Whether you/should/ have this right is something of a different matter, but you clearly do have it.
I think that's the last thing anyone would want If this is considered a problem, then the correct procedure would be to amend the constitution and add "btw, only the feds can have nukes, mmkay?". The absolutely/worst/ way of solving the problem is to start selectively ignoring the Constitution. Well, unless the idea is to not actually have one I suppose.
So there's a long, long history of control over core documents, even of having secret internal documents. So it can't be the only criteria for defining a cult, or for irritation with Scientology. The primary difference between the Scientologists and the Catholic church in this regard would be that the latter withheld documents completely (there would be no way to get at them) because they thought they contained erroneous or damaging information while as the former is holding back documents (temporarily) in order to milk their followers for money. Current CoS behaviour is more akin to the Catholics' (long since deprecated) practice of selling divine pardon etc.: no more and no less than a way of monetizing faith.
Of course, the CoS seems to have been set up with this one goal first and foremost in mind while the Catholics did this more as an aside (or accidentally perhaps, if you want to be nice). This distinction may be useful for making value judgements concerning the two organizations:-)
The peacock's tail is a parallel example: it says to other peacocks, "look how great I am, I'm so superior that I can afford to drag around and put calories into growing this ridiculous tail even though it could make me a lion's breakfast, therefore you should be interested in me." In the case of the peacock, I think the message is rather that "look, I am so healthy that I can spend considerable spare resources into growing a magnificent tail, and my DNA is so undamaged that the result is perfection itself as you can clearly see". Even the less successful tail-growers are good lion snacks, after all.
Humans largely transition away from health-based criteria when standard of living improves, although we seem to retain some symmetry-based ones (which may or may not help indicate health and DNA quality).
This is an example of bundling (i.e. you always have to buy "a" and "b" together). Economically bundling always favors the seller giving them more power and money (the reasons are to complicated to explain here; look it up in an Econ book). It is not illegal, but it can really disadvantage the buyer and when the seller is running a de facto monopoly (as most non-metropolitan, US, broadband ISPs are) they could be hauled up on anti-trust allegations. In Norway, bundling is actually illegal if the products in the bundle are dissimilar (e.g. you can bundle four bottles of coca-cola, but not a book to go with them since books and soft drinks are very different types of product), unless you can also buy the bundled items separately at roughly the same price. I believe the intent is to prevent monopolists from leveraging their monopolies into other markets through clever bundling.
Of course, bundling still happens from time to time and only sometimes do the authorities care enough to do something about it. I think this is in the category of "things that we ignore so long as nobody complains too much". Kinder eggs are still around, for example. The legality of bundling an iPhone with a telco subscription is probably about to get tested. It is probably illegal. Of course, IANAL.
Can anyone explain why the solar system is a pancake or that galaxies end up in disks? Angular momentum causes the formation of an accretion disc (aka pancake) from which the orbiting bodies form.
(...) Ask yourself this question, do you do more vertical scrolling or horizontal scrolling? To me, the important question is: which do you find the more annoying - having to scroll horizontally or having to scroll vertically? For me, any screen that reduces the need for horizontal scrolling has a clear advantage over the competition.
Also, for programming I find it more useful to stack different tools/views sideways than on top of each other. In practice, for project tree views etc., having the horizontal space to have them on the side of the main editor view actually makes for less vertical scrolling than what would have been the case had I been forced to put them above or below the editor view.
ps- domestic terrorism in the USA is pretty rare. This is mostly due to bias. A school shooting in Baghdad would be labeled as a terrorist attack whereas the same type of incident in the US will be labeled as a crime.
The odd thing is that the Catholic Church and many Jewish Rabbis appear to have no problem with idea of evolution and big bang because they do not adhere to something that conflicts with the idea of genesis seeing that god could have used that as his method. While I don't know about rabbis, the above is not the fundamental reason why the Catholics can accept evolution. Their acceptance of (or, rather, lack of resistance to) evolution is a side effect of them having accepted Thomas Aquinas' more general reasoning as to how and why philosophical and scientific findings that are on the face of it contrary to church doctrine can nevertheless be accepted by the church as possible truths. Aquinas only leaves a very few (four or five-ish I think) religious dogma as unassailable by science - in every other case, the Bible is only to be seen as some sort of an introductory text with all the weaknesses of such. Therefore, even if evolution was directly counter to some part of the Genesis, it would still be acceptable (even if unpopular) to the church.
It does seem that the Catholic church preferred to keep such new ideas within scholarly circles and not disseminated to the general population, ostensibly in order not to confuse Johnny Q. Worshipper, but this policy appears to have been killed off by the emergence of the information age.
Slashdot Mirror
You can copyright any drawing, painting or other artwork, photograph, etc.
In fact you must, since copyright is automatic. (Somewhat dependent upon local laws obviously.)
As for murder and theft, being worded in the context of being illegal they clearly are considered bad and therefore made illegal. Worded as "killing" and "taking someone's property away", however, they are
It all depends on context.
This probably stems from the fundamentally impossible nature of the problem case: "determine if this person is to be trusted". Humans and their ancestors have spent the last several million years in an evolutionary and cultural power struggle of trying to hide their own true motivations and also trying to sense those of others. We remain at a stalemate and when facing such an intractable problem, there is a strong tendency to grasp at the full-of-promises-and-screw-reality type "solutions" presented by varying divining methods such as the polygraph.
Of course, the beauty of most of these divining methods is that if the operator is good enough at cold reading
Of course, if you allow yourself to anthropomorphize oil, I am quite sure the Oil is happy with being as valuable as it is so in this sense it may have been a war for Oil.
I think that's it really.
But then, I'm also European so what do I know
That the Japenese government failed to properly capitalize on this six month head start is a different matter entirely. They took a calculated gamble and they lost. This can happen to the Greatest of Powers.
Sony et al, however, appear to have absolutely no realization of how much pain they are currently setting themselves up for further down the line. This happens when your leaders are too far removed from reality to be able to make rational decisions. And when your shareholders repeatedly fail to recognize this state of affairs.
A drug that claims to be Viagra but is actually manufactured by someone other than the trademark holder for the mark "Viagra" is not a threat to anyone but the trademark holder
Therefore, what we need is
Which isn't half bad coming from an industry that is still trying to find its feet.
goAfterTheBeardedGuy();
}while(beardedguy == brown); Your algorithm has a fatal bug: the first time through it may go after the white guy.
Why do you hate America? Are you a terrorist?
This was the case in WWII and it's still the case today. The primary difference between WW2 and modern wars is that in WW2, they would have had to carpet bomb the entire neighbourhood (or the entire town) in order to have a decent chance of taking out that one building while as today, only the one building needs to go. It may still be nasty, but it is certainly
(Granted, they did use Mosquito aircraft for strategic precision bombing in WW2, but these were very difficult high-risk missions and generally only used to reduce collateral damage in attacks against very important targets in friendly, occupied countries.)
As an example, if I know that you are seriously hydrophobic I can know with 100% certainty that given the choice of swimming across a canal and taking the bridge, you are always going to use the bridge. You are this predictable exactly because you
(Of course, it doesn't really help matters that we have yet to come up with a generally acceptable definition of "free will" so any discussion of this topic is necessarily confusing and prone to misunderstandings.)
An alternative way to convince oneself of the 2/3 probability (this only really holds if goats have no value for you, but let's humor me and assume that for now) is as follows:
/two/ chances at the car rather than just one. Again, we assume that you will just donate any goats received to charity.
1. Monty tells you that behind one of the doors is a car and behind the two others are goats (which have no value to you and so might as well not be there in the first place).
2. Monty asks you to choose a door. You do so.
3. Monty then tells you that if you stay with the door that you chose, you will be given whatever is behind it but that if you switch, you will get the prizes behind both the two remaining doors.
Switching therefore (rather intuitively) gives you
The above is an equivalent scenario to the original one because step (3) is functionally equivalent to Monty removing the door that is known not to contain anything of value.
Of course, if you're a goat farmer, things may be different.
Of course, the CoS seems to have been set up with this one goal first and foremost in mind while the Catholics did this more as an aside (or accidentally perhaps, if you want to be nice). This distinction may be useful for making value judgements concerning the two organizations
Humans largely transition away from health-based criteria when standard of living improves, although we seem to retain some symmetry-based ones (which may or may not help indicate health and DNA quality).
Of course, bundling still happens from time to time and only sometimes do the authorities care enough to do something about it. I think this is in the category of "things that we ignore so long as nobody complains too much". Kinder eggs are still around, for example. The legality of bundling an iPhone with a telco subscription is probably about to get tested. It is probably illegal. Of course, IANAL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disc
Also, for programming I find it more useful to stack different tools/views sideways than on top of each other. In practice, for project tree views etc., having the horizontal space to have them on the side of the main editor view actually makes for less vertical scrolling than what would have been the case had I been forced to put them above or below the editor view.
It does seem that the Catholic church preferred to keep such new ideas within scholarly circles and not disseminated to the general population, ostensibly in order not to confuse Johnny Q. Worshipper, but this policy appears to have been killed off by the emergence of the information age.