Not quite. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives actually did pass a bill redefining pi. The bill didn't become law, but it still reflects rather badly on the Indiana House of Representatives.
The Snopes article confirms this at the end.
Indeed. An Iranian friend of mine thinks that the election of Ahmedinejad as President is a good thing precisely because he bluntly says what the majority in Iran think.
Well put. Too many people are caving in and taking the position that ridicule of Islam is wrong and offensive and bigotry, that the only issue here is one of freedom of the press. While it is wrong to persecute people for their beliefs, it is entirely proper to oppose and ridicule belief systems that are harmful, and if you look at it objectively, mainstream Islam is harmful. I have the same negative view of Christianity and Communism, so don't think that I have it in for Islam in particular, but Islam is the issue at the moment.
It is absolutely mainstream Islam that Islam is the only valid religion, that it should be spread to the entire world, that those who refuse to accept it (other than a subset of Jews and Christians whose definition varies but is often taken to be a small subset) should be killed, and that those non-Muslims should be treated as second-class citizens. It is black-letter Islamic law that the testimony of non-Muslims counts less than that of Muslims, for example. Some Muslims may claim that jihad really refers to personal spiritual struggle, but in point of fact, most Muslims now and throughout history have interpreted jihad differently and Islam has spread to a large extent via military conquest. Mainstream Islam explicitly demands theocracy - there is no concept of separation of church and state. And of course like other revealed supernatural religions Islam demands that believers believe many things on irrational grounds.
So, if separation of church and state, equality before the law, freedom of speech and of belief, peaceful resolution of disputes and rational enquiry are among your values, you must oppose Islam, just as you must oppose Christianity, Communism, Postmodernism and other forms of obscurantism and
oppression. By all means let's make these debates as civil as possible, but they can't and shouldn't be avoided. If Islam were like, say, belief in the Great Pumpkin, we could just ignore it and avoid offending believers, but insofar as Islam wants to be and is a force that affects the lives of other people, other people are entitled to examine it and criticise it.
Mohammed may have written the entire Koran, but much of what Muslims believe is not in the Koran. The Koran is the nominal basis for Islam, but the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, are also very important. There are lots of them and there is much dispute over the authenticity of particular sayings. The hadith play a role roughly comparable to that of the New Testament for Christians. Furthermore, the Koran is not exactly clear on many points. On some it is vague, on others it contradicts itself. It is not like you can just look in the Koran for a clear and explicit position on everything.
There is some prejudice in Japan against Koreans, but it isn't like what you have heard. Koreans have had the opportunity to become Japanese citizens for decades. The problem is that to become a Japanese citizen you have to take a Japanese family name. For many people this isn't a big deal, but for Koreans the family name is very important. As a result, many Korean residents of Japan do not become citizens because they are unwilling to change their names.
This policy presents a particular problem for Koreans, but it applies to everybody and was not imposed in order to discriminate against Koreans. It is part of the very general Japanese policy of requiring those who wish to become citizens to demonstrate a degree of assimilation to Japanese culture. Applicants for Japanese citizenship are visited by inspectors who look into things like whether the family speak Japanese at home, whether their home is furnished partly or wholly in a Japanese style, and so forth.
I have a friend who was born and brought up in Japan and speaks no other language. His mother is Japanese, but his father was Chinese,
so under the law at the time, he was not a Japanese citizen. When as an adult he became a Japanese citizen, he had to replace his Chinese family name with a Japanese family name.
In other news, the Water Company today demanded that Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other soft drink companies pay them a percentage of their profits.
"They take our product and use it to make a great deal of money. It isn't fair that we don't benefit." said company spokesman Joe Whiner. Across town, the Electric Company complained that it does not benefit sufficiently from the activities of aluminum smelters, who use large amounts of electricity to make large profits. The Electric Company is demanding a share of the income from aluminum above and beyond the cost of the electricity.
Ah, interesting. My memory was half-wrong, right about the lack of iron swords etc., but wrong about the reason being technology as opposed to raw material. It must have been rather disconcerting to have your bronze sword broken by your opponent's iron sword.
Perhaps my memory serves me wrong, but I thought that the Egyptians only acquired the ability to work iron after the 18th dynasty. Wasn't the lack of iron technology a major reason for the difficulty the Egyptians had in fighting the Hittites under the Ramessides, in the 19th dynasty?
I'm curious about the demo that pissed off the trial judge.
Does anybody know exactly what they did? What I wonder is whether it was truly a fraud or whether they used more recent software for innocuous reasons (e.g. they didn't have all of the original environment) and the demo was actually valid as evidence that the old technology worked?
I'm not sure I see your point. Arguing against secret laws and regulations isn't pointless even if the particular example we have
to hand is one that would be constitutional if it were not secret.
On the other hand, if what you mean is that the constitutionality
of the government requiring ID is irrelevant because the government
can require the airlines to do it and the airlines aren't bound by
the constitution, that's wrong. Non-governmental entities are indeed
not bound by constitutional restrictions on the government, but a law requiring non-governmental entities to do something that would be unconstitutional for the government to do itself is also unconstitutional. If not, the constitution would be almost meaningless as the government could do whatever it felt like indirectly. There is no such loophole.
What law would you be referring to? Thus far no evidence has been produced that there is any law requiring ID to fly. The government claims that its a secret.
I have two problems with this decision. First, while I won't argue that there is an absolute right to anonymity, I have yet to hear an argument for the proposition that checking ID makes flying safer. The 9/11 terrorists had valid ID. If the government is using ID as a substitute for searches or X-ray or whatever is actually needed, they're kidding themselves.
The larger problem with this decision is the court's acceptance of the claim that there can be secret laws and regulations and specifically that this regulation is legitimately secret. The very idea of secret laws and regulations is inconsistent with open, democratic government.
Moreover, not a shred of justification has been offered for the secrecy of this particular regulation. (The only situation I can imagine in which a secret regulation might be legitimate is when it has to mention something whose existence is a legitimate secret, but even then it would seem that the regulation could be revealed to those that it affects (since they would know about the secret anyhow) and that it should be possible to publish the regulation in a more abstract form (e.g. classifying some class of weapons).) What conceivable basis could there be for classifying a regulation requiring passengers to produce ID?
Microsoft's proposal is to provide source code and 12,000 pages
of incomprehensible "documentation", and in any case, this isn't what they're being asked to do. On the one hand, nobody is asking that Microsoft reveal the details of their implementation. Indeed, nobody wants to know that because it would just make it problematic for other people to create interfaces to Microsoft's products since there would be the risk of being accused of using Microsoft trade secrets. On the other hand, source code is an inadequate response. One reason is of course that it is a huge amount of work to figure out what it does. The other is that once you know what it does, you don't know what is part of the standard, what is a bug, and what is an option.
All that Microsoft has been asked to do is to provide proper documentation for its interface protocols. Those are not the crown jewels. Their failure to provide it means either that they are unwilling to comply or that they are incompetant.
For some reason the article doesn't mention that Microsoft's proposal is to provide the server source code and 500 hours of "free" support under an NDA and at a cost of US$10,000. That pretty much excludes both OSS
and companies without much funding. A proper standard would of course be free or nearly so (as I recall ISO docs are around US$100.)
Given the increasing reliance on the net for so many purposes, I wonder if indiscriminately knocking out networks would not be a war crime, just as indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian installations are?
I don't think the journalists got it wrong. They didn't say that people found the sexually explicit content in the source - they said that people found it because the developers left it in the source. That's true. The reason it appears in the binary is because it was included in the source. If the developers had been responsible, they would have made sure that their joke was not in the code that was released. Sure, they could have done that via conditional compilation ("make noporn"), but by far the safest way not to get yourself in trouble is not to put stuff like that in the source to begin with.
Microsoft has either willfully refused to comply with the Commission's order or implicitly admitted that it is incapable of producing proper documentation. Either way, the ball is no longer in their court - it is up to the Commission to remedy the situation. What the Commission should do is license one copy of the code, hire some programmers and technical writers, and produce the documentation itself. They can pay for this out of the fines that Microsoft will be paying for its failure to comply. That way the world gets the documentation, only a small group of people are exposed to Microsoft's code, and Microsoft bears the cost. There's even a benefit to Microsoft in it: they'll find out what their software is supposed to do and be in a better position to test it and debug it.
Exactly what Chinese law would that be? Much of what the Chinese government does is extra-legal and arguably in violation of the Chinese Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and other rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives actually did pass a bill redefining pi. The bill didn't become law, but it still reflects rather badly on the Indiana House of Representatives. The Snopes article confirms this at the end.
My favorite crazy geek name is "Ransom Love", once CEO of Caldera.
Indeed. An Iranian friend of mine thinks that the election of Ahmedinejad as President is a good thing precisely because he bluntly says what the majority in Iran think.
Well put. Too many people are caving in and taking the position that ridicule of Islam is wrong and offensive and bigotry, that the only issue here is one of freedom of the press. While it is wrong to persecute people for their beliefs, it is entirely proper to oppose and ridicule belief systems that are harmful, and if you look at it objectively, mainstream Islam is harmful. I have the same negative view of Christianity and Communism, so don't think that I have it in for Islam in particular, but Islam is the issue at the moment.
It is absolutely mainstream Islam that Islam is the only valid religion, that it should be spread to the entire world, that those who refuse to accept it (other than a subset of Jews and Christians whose definition varies but is often taken to be a small subset) should be killed, and that those non-Muslims should be treated as second-class citizens. It is black-letter Islamic law that the testimony of non-Muslims counts less than that of Muslims, for example. Some Muslims may claim that jihad really refers to personal spiritual struggle, but in point of fact, most Muslims now and throughout history have interpreted jihad differently and Islam has spread to a large extent via military conquest. Mainstream Islam explicitly demands theocracy - there is no concept of separation of church and state. And of course like other revealed supernatural religions Islam demands that believers believe many things on irrational grounds.
So, if separation of church and state, equality before the law, freedom of speech and of belief, peaceful resolution of disputes and rational enquiry are among your values, you must oppose Islam, just as you must oppose Christianity, Communism, Postmodernism and other forms of obscurantism and oppression. By all means let's make these debates as civil as possible, but they can't and shouldn't be avoided. If Islam were like, say, belief in the Great Pumpkin, we could just ignore it and avoid offending believers, but insofar as Islam wants to be and is a force that affects the lives of other people, other people are entitled to examine it and criticise it.
Mohammed may have written the entire Koran, but much of what Muslims believe is not in the Koran. The Koran is the nominal basis for Islam, but the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, are also very important. There are lots of them and there is much dispute over the authenticity of particular sayings. The hadith play a role roughly comparable to that of the New Testament for Christians. Furthermore, the Koran is not exactly clear on many points. On some it is vague, on others it contradicts itself. It is not like you can just look in the Koran for a clear and explicit position on everything.
Shouldn't that be:
End of Faith is a very interesting book. Do finish reading it.
There is some prejudice in Japan against Koreans, but it isn't like what you have heard. Koreans have had the opportunity to become Japanese citizens for decades. The problem is that to become a Japanese citizen you have to take a Japanese family name. For many people this isn't a big deal, but for Koreans the family name is very important. As a result, many Korean residents of Japan do not become citizens because they are unwilling to change their names.
This policy presents a particular problem for Koreans, but it applies to everybody and was not imposed in order to discriminate against Koreans. It is part of the very general Japanese policy of requiring those who wish to become citizens to demonstrate a degree of assimilation to Japanese culture. Applicants for Japanese citizenship are visited by inspectors who look into things like whether the family speak Japanese at home, whether their home is furnished partly or wholly in a Japanese style, and so forth.
I have a friend who was born and brought up in Japan and speaks no other language. His mother is Japanese, but his father was Chinese, so under the law at the time, he was not a Japanese citizen. When as an adult he became a Japanese citizen, he had to replace his Chinese family name with a Japanese family name.
In other news, the Water Company today demanded that Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other soft drink companies pay them a percentage of their profits. "They take our product and use it to make a great deal of money. It isn't fair that we don't benefit." said company spokesman Joe Whiner. Across town, the Electric Company complained that it does not benefit sufficiently from the activities of aluminum smelters, who use large amounts of electricity to make large profits. The Electric Company is demanding a share of the income from aluminum above and beyond the cost of the electricity.
Dunno about Perl and Python, but I use ActiveTcl.
Ah, interesting. My memory was half-wrong, right about the lack of iron swords etc., but wrong about the reason being technology as opposed to raw material. It must have been rather disconcerting to have your bronze sword broken by your opponent's iron sword.
Yes, but I was referring specifically to OP's mention of iron-based technology. I know that the Egyptians had bronze at the time.
Perhaps my memory serves me wrong, but I thought that the Egyptians only acquired the ability to work iron after the 18th dynasty. Wasn't the lack of iron technology a major reason for the difficulty the Egyptians had in fighting the Hittites under the Ramessides, in the 19th dynasty?
I'm curious about the demo that pissed off the trial judge. Does anybody know exactly what they did? What I wonder is whether it was truly a fraud or whether they used more recent software for innocuous reasons (e.g. they didn't have all of the original environment) and the demo was actually valid as evidence that the old technology worked?
I'm not sure I see your point. Arguing against secret laws and regulations isn't pointless even if the particular example we have to hand is one that would be constitutional if it were not secret.
On the other hand, if what you mean is that the constitutionality of the government requiring ID is irrelevant because the government can require the airlines to do it and the airlines aren't bound by the constitution, that's wrong. Non-governmental entities are indeed not bound by constitutional restrictions on the government, but a law requiring non-governmental entities to do something that would be unconstitutional for the government to do itself is also unconstitutional. If not, the constitution would be almost meaningless as the government could do whatever it felt like indirectly. There is no such loophole.
No doubt that'll be illegal under the DMCA. :)
What law would you be referring to? Thus far no evidence has been produced that there is any law requiring ID to fly. The government claims that its a secret.
I have two problems with this decision. First, while I won't argue that there is an absolute right to anonymity, I have yet to hear an argument for the proposition that checking ID makes flying safer. The 9/11 terrorists had valid ID. If the government is using ID as a substitute for searches or X-ray or whatever is actually needed, they're kidding themselves.
The larger problem with this decision is the court's acceptance of the claim that there can be secret laws and regulations and specifically that this regulation is legitimately secret. The very idea of secret laws and regulations is inconsistent with open, democratic government. Moreover, not a shred of justification has been offered for the secrecy of this particular regulation. (The only situation I can imagine in which a secret regulation might be legitimate is when it has to mention something whose existence is a legitimate secret, but even then it would seem that the regulation could be revealed to those that it affects (since they would know about the secret anyhow) and that it should be possible to publish the regulation in a more abstract form (e.g. classifying some class of weapons).) What conceivable basis could there be for classifying a regulation requiring passengers to produce ID?
Microsoft's proposal is to provide source code and 12,000 pages of incomprehensible "documentation", and in any case, this isn't what they're being asked to do. On the one hand, nobody is asking that Microsoft reveal the details of their implementation. Indeed, nobody wants to know that because it would just make it problematic for other people to create interfaces to Microsoft's products since there would be the risk of being accused of using Microsoft trade secrets. On the other hand, source code is an inadequate response. One reason is of course that it is a huge amount of work to figure out what it does. The other is that once you know what it does, you don't know what is part of the standard, what is a bug, and what is an option.
All that Microsoft has been asked to do is to provide proper documentation for its interface protocols. Those are not the crown jewels. Their failure to provide it means either that they are unwilling to comply or that they are incompetant.
For some reason the article doesn't mention that Microsoft's proposal is to provide the server source code and 500 hours of "free" support under an NDA and at a cost of US$10,000. That pretty much excludes both OSS and companies without much funding. A proper standard would of course be free or nearly so (as I recall ISO docs are around US$100.)
Given the increasing reliance on the net for so many purposes, I wonder if indiscriminately knocking out networks would not be a war crime, just as indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian installations are?
I don't think the journalists got it wrong. They didn't say that people found the sexually explicit content in the source - they said that people found it because the developers left it in the source. That's true. The reason it appears in the binary is because it was included in the source. If the developers had been responsible, they would have made sure that their joke was not in the code that was released. Sure, they could have done that via conditional compilation ("make noporn"), but by far the safest way not to get yourself in trouble is not to put stuff like that in the source to begin with.
But does it run Linux?
Microsoft has either willfully refused to comply with the Commission's order or implicitly admitted that it is incapable of producing proper documentation. Either way, the ball is no longer in their court - it is up to the Commission to remedy the situation. What the Commission should do is license one copy of the code, hire some programmers and technical writers, and produce the documentation itself. They can pay for this out of the fines that Microsoft will be paying for its failure to comply. That way the world gets the documentation, only a small group of people are exposed to Microsoft's code, and Microsoft bears the cost. There's even a benefit to Microsoft in it: they'll find out what their software is supposed to do and be in a better position to test it and debug it.
Exactly what Chinese law would that be? Much of what the Chinese government does is extra-legal and arguably in violation of the Chinese Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and other rights.