The fact that I am legally obligated to pay my taxes which fund the public library means that my rights under the constitution must be observed, regardless of what the majority (or vocal minority) wants
I'm not saying you can't view whatever sites you want to in your own home. I'm simply saying that a person should have the right to voice his/her opinion on how money that they earned is spent by the government. They have to pay taxes, same as you. If they object to their money being used to provide Internet access without some sort of blocking software, then they have the right to try and have that software installed. As I said in my first post, I think its a bad idea, simply because it doesn't work, but if people still wish to have their money spent in that manner, then its their right to lobby for it. Since the money for the library is supplied by multiple people, each of whom may have differing views on how that money should be spent, it must be decided by majority vote. It isn't a case of majority rule with protection of the minority because there is no way to protect everyone's interests. Either you are forced to pay your taxes to fund a library that doesn't provide the content you'd like, or someone else is forced to fund a library that provides content they feel should not be provided with their money.
It's not the same as carrying or not carrying a certain book or magazine. Those are physical objects which must be obtained and cost money to obtain.
It makes no difference. Either way, if someone is forced to fund the library, then they have the right to have their say in what content is provided by that library, whether or not that content comes at an extra cost or not, just as you have a right to have your say in the matter. If they were forced to choose between either providing Internet access with no filtering, or not providing Internet access at all, I can guarantee you most of the proponents of the filtering software would prefer not to provided Internet access at all. In that case, it does become an issue of which "books" to purchase.
An adult's access should not be filtered, period.
I agree completely - when that adult's money, and only that adult's money is used to purchase access.
Yes, it's a perfectly good reason to remove the filters. But it's because they don't work, not because they violate the 1st Amendment. The fact that libraries use public funds means that the public should be able to decide how those funds are allocated. It's not like they're going into people's homes and demanding that this software be installed. That would be a violation of the 1st Amendment.
His point was that they aren't preventing you from seeing it; they're just preventing you from using public facilities to see it. You're still free to view whatever you choose in your own home. Careful when you call someone a "fucking moron", lest you be so labeled yourself.
Well most University of Michigan students are too stupid to understand Linux.
And which school has the higher ranked Comp. Sci/Eng. department? Yes, you have a better basketball team, but your football team sucks most years, and your Engineering department isn't even worth mentioning.
Some of us aren't so ashamed of our school that we need to post anonymously.
It's not OO because Linus Torvalds is one of the relative few who hasn't been suckered into creating bloated
C++ code need not be much more bloated than C code. It may have a little more overhead, but current C++ compilers are getting close to the efficiency of C compilers. It really isn't enough to make a difference.
inefficient How so? If you can do it in C, you can do it in C++ just as well. OO != inefficient.
buggy ??? C++ is much more organized than C, making bugs far less likely. It's not like C++ is some brand new language that hasn't had time to be tested. It's been around for quite some time.
hard-to-maintain Please at least read a book on C++/OOP before knocking it. You've convinced me with this one that you really don't know much about C++ or OOP in general. C++ is far easier to maintain than C. It's whole structure is designed for this very purpose, and it succeeds at this quite well.
(Can you tell I feel strongly about this?) Yes, I just wish you'd reseach a subject before forming an opinion on it. OOP is not the answer to everything, but it does not suffer from the things you claim it does. Java might, but that's for other resons entirely. If you'd work with C++ for any length of time on any large scale project, you might learn to appreciate it.
The trouble with the USA is the overwhelming number of small minded individuals who arrogantly pass judgement on civilizations and cultures that dare to suggest that maybe the USA should think a bit about the rest of the world for a change
The trouble with the rest of the world is the overwhelming number of small minded individuals who arrogantly assume that a vocal minority of small minded Americans justifies stereotyping the rest of the population. I for one am sick of listening to Europeans whining about how evil America is. We've got our problems, just like everyone else, but we're no worse than anyone else either.
If you want to know the "why" for anything, you need to read the Federalist Papers.
Um, I was about to suggest you do the same thing when I read this. I find it hard to believe you've ever read them and can actually claim what you do about the 2nd ammendment. First of all, "State" does not refer to any of the individual states that make up the union. "State" in its most proper sense refers to a nation as a whole. In this light, to say that the State is responsible for regulating the militia makes no sense. The "security of the free State" is, in fact, the security of the freedoms of the nation as a whole. If you read the Federalist Papers, and other writings by the Founders, you quickly realize that the greatest threat they envisioned to the security of this free State was not any outside power, but the government itself. If it was their intent to have the militia regulated by the State, then they would be granting it control over the body that was intended to keep it in check. This would require a monumental feat of stupidity. The 2nd ammendment does, indeed, grant the citizens of the US the right to bear arms. You mentioned in another post that the Supreme Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution. This is correct, but misleading. For all legal purposes, the Supreme Court is responsible for deciding the stance of the Constitution, but that does not mean that their interpretation is the correct one. If the Supreme Court decided tomorrow that "Hey, we were wrong all along... there really isn't anything about the freedom of speech in the Constitution, then we would be legally bound by that interpretation. But they'd still be wrong. Even if the Supreme Court decided that the 2nd ammendment didn't protect the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms(which, last I checked, they hadn't), they wouldn't be right. We'd be legally bound by their decision, but to say they were right in their interpretation would be to ignore two centuries of contrary interpretations. Those who founded this country clearly believed this right was protected by the 2nd ammendment, and, since they did sort of write the thing, I'm inclined to believe them, regardless of what the Supreme Court says tomorrow.
I'm not sure why this theory violates God's Law. Please explain. I haven't read through it yet (I'm assuming you have) so I can't say that for sure, but from the abstract, I don't see where you find offense with it. Any clarification would be appreciated.
I assume, of course, that you've proven this, since nobody would even consider posting something on/. that they couldn't prove. Please post the proof here. I'm sure it was just an oversight that it wasn't posted originally.
1.This God that you seem to have put forward as the Uncaused Cause: Where does He live? What is He made of? What are the physical laws that determine His abilities? How might we experimentally prove or disprove His existance and properties?
This has bugged me for years. At what point can we say we've explained everything that exists? Is it possible to explain the existance of physical laws or mathematics, since such an explanation would not be able to rely on them (in other words, they can't explain their own existance) To explain why mathematics works the way it does, we have to develop a theory to explain how it arose from nothing, without using math to create the theory. I don't think this is possible. You criticize him for putting forth God as the Uncaused Cause (not that his message didn't deserve plenty of criticism), but then ask what physical laws determine His existance. Are you not, therefore, putting forth these Physical Laws as an Uncaused Cause? Are you willing to accept the idea that the laws of physics and mathematics have no origin, and simply exist without cause, or do you believe that it is somehow possible for them to arise from true nothingness?
I am a Christian today due, in part, to this very question. I have not yet heard an adequate explanation. I realize that Christianity doesn't explain it, since we accept the idea that God can exist without cause. It just seems to me that this makes more sense than saying that abstract ideas and laws can exist without cause. Any thought anyone has on this would be appreciated.
Perhaps our current understanding of the nature of the universe is incapable of describing the things you mentioned. String theory, while focused on unification, also redefines many of our beliefs about our universe. It may be that it is necessary to continue developing this theory, assuming it is on the right track, before we can even hope to understand the points you mentioned. For starters, I believe that string theorists have claimed that they may have a solution to the dark matter problem - something they came across while developing the theory without any thought for finding a solution to this particular problem. Now, it may be that this is just another false lead, but you can't deny the fact that many of the discoveries we have made in Physics first required a complete overhaul of our previous understandings of the universe.
Today's fascinating insight: according to string theory, our universe has as many as 9 spatial dimensions
Keep reading... they're now saying 10 spatial dimensions, and 1 temporal. It seems that with the extra spatial dimension, the various string theories (Type I, Type IIa, Type IIb, Heterotic type O(32) and Heterotic type E8 x E8) turn out to be "reflections" of each other, and a new theory, called M-theory, is starting to emerge from it... but I don't want to spoil the book for you;)
My question is, and I think this might have been asked in Elegant Universe, is: Is it possible that some of these extra dimensions are actually temporal dimensions, and not spatial dimensions? i.e., might we live in a Universe with 6 spatial dimensions and 5 temporal dimensions? I'm curious as to how extra temporal dimensions might behave...
Yes, excellent book. Michio Kaku has written a number of excellent books. I'd also recommend Beyond Einstein. It was one of the first I'd ever read on the subject. About Time by Paul Davies is also excellent, though not entirely on topic for this discussion. If you like the others though, it will probably be of great interest to you. You just have to get through the first few chapters where he discusses various mystical beliefs surrounding the nature of time - I found that a bit annoying.
I thought they already tried this with strings and superstrings and other physics mumbo-jumbo
String theory is far from dead. It's currently evolving into what is called M-theory (basicly, it's a combination of the various approaches to string theory) Progress is a bit slow, but there's a reason they say string theory is 21st century physics that just happened to be discovered in the 20th century. The mathematics behind it are well beyond what anyone is currently capable of dealing with - at best, they can only come up with approximate solutions to approximate equations. (YOU try working out the mathematical equations to describe the physical principles of 6 extra dimensions folded up in a Calabi-Yau space) String theory has always had its critics, but it has survived thus far simply because it has such an enormous potential for explaining our universe. Don't discount it.
Although I'm certainly pleased with the finding of facts, a small part of me was hoping the judge would find in favor of MS. I like the fact that Linux has made the gains it has based solely on its merits. It never needed the DoJ to get this far. I realize that without government intervention it would have been a slow uphill battle all the way, but, while this doesn't mean that M$ is just going to disappear overnight or anything like that, I can't help but wonder if there will be those who accuse Linux of needing the DoJ to compete against Windows. It seems that we might find ourselves having to defend any gains we make based on technical superiority against accusations that Linux wouldn't be able to compete without help. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but given M$'s massive PR machine, they could easily twist this in any number of ways. All this is assuming, of course, that the actuall ruling is more than just a slap on the wrist. We may see absolutely no change if they settle or the ruling is watered down.
I actually found it a bit annoying. It just has never sounded right to me. I was using Linux long before I ever heard it refered to as GNU/Linux, so I doubt it will ever sound right. I don't really have a problem with those who prefer to call it that, though I do tend to roll my eyes whenever I hear it. Those who insist it should be called GNU/Linux do tend to bug me quite a bit though.
I say we take the world's slowest NT machine from a few articles back and run some benchmarks on it against this new toy:) Let's see MS put *those* benchmarks on their website:) But I think NT would beat Linux out in the TCO department on that one;)
Vending machines are evil anyway. Avoid them. I have declared a personal jihad against the vending machines in one of the lounges here on campus. I swear the local satanist group offers human sacrifices to these things on a daily basis. They are constantly devouring my money, and giving nothing in return. They are EVIL! But I will be victorious in my war against them. It's just a matter of time.
what's the point? Most people I know who have any clue about what they're doing just assemble their own systems. The others... use Windows. Who are they trying to target here? If the average user sees that it doesn't have Windows, I seriously doubt he'd even consider buying it. I think these types of people are by far their largest customer base. I don't see this as having any effect on Microsoft.
I can't believe these people can maintain any credibility when Cerf gets elected over Al Gore. Now I realize that he has made his contributions an all, but lets face it - he's hardly the father of the Internet. Anyone who knows what they are talking about will tell you that Big Al is the real father of the Internet. C'mon people, at least research the subject before reporting on it.
I say we make our voices heard. If we're to have only one representative on the board, it has to be Al. Lose the Cerf guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying you can't view whatever sites you want to in your own home. I'm simply saying that a person should have the right to voice his/her opinion on how money that they earned is spent by the government. They have to pay taxes, same as you. If they object to their money being used to provide Internet access without some sort of blocking software, then they have the right to try and have that software installed. As I said in my first post, I think its a bad idea, simply because it doesn't work, but if people still wish to have their money spent in that manner, then its their right to lobby for it. Since the money for the library is supplied by multiple people, each of whom may have differing views on how that money should be spent, it must be decided by majority vote. It isn't a case of majority rule with protection of the minority because there is no way to protect everyone's interests. Either you are forced to pay your taxes to fund a library that doesn't provide the content you'd like, or someone else is forced to fund a library that provides content they feel should not be provided with their money.
It's not the same as carrying or not carrying a certain book or magazine. Those are physical objects which must be obtained and cost money to obtain.
It makes no difference. Either way, if someone is forced to fund the library, then they have the right to have their say in what content is provided by that library, whether or not that content comes at an extra cost or not, just as you have a right to have your say in the matter. If they were forced to choose between either providing Internet access with no filtering, or not providing Internet access at all, I can guarantee you most of the proponents of the filtering software would prefer not to provided Internet access at all. In that case, it does become an issue of which "books" to purchase.
An adult's access should not be filtered, period.
I agree completely - when that adult's money, and only that adult's money is used to purchase access.
Yes, it's a perfectly good reason to remove the filters. But it's because they don't work, not because they violate the 1st Amendment. The fact that libraries use public funds means that the public should be able to decide how those funds are allocated. It's not like they're going into people's homes and demanding that this software be installed. That would be a violation of the 1st Amendment.
His point was that they aren't preventing you from seeing it; they're just preventing you from using public facilities to see it. You're still free to view whatever you choose in your own home. Careful when you call someone a "fucking moron", lest you be so labeled yourself.
Well most University of Michigan students are too stupid to understand Linux.
And which school has the higher ranked Comp. Sci/Eng. department? Yes, you have a better basketball team, but your football team sucks most years, and your Engineering department isn't even worth mentioning.
Some of us aren't so ashamed of our school that we need to post anonymously.
Anyone care to explain to me how that managed to get marked as a troll?
From their website:
Their huge success is without any doubt based on the Nano-Tek® technology the company patented 25,000 years ago!
Not only do we fail to fix the patent system in the next 30,000 years, but it gets even worse. Patent lifetime is now 25,000+ years!
It's not OO because Linus Torvalds is one of the relative few who hasn't been suckered into creating bloated
C++ code need not be much more bloated than C code. It may have a little more overhead, but current C++ compilers are getting close to the efficiency of C compilers. It really isn't enough to make a difference.
inefficient
How so? If you can do it in C, you can do it in C++ just as well. OO != inefficient.
buggy
???
C++ is much more organized than C, making bugs far less likely. It's not like C++ is some brand new language that hasn't had time to be tested. It's been around for quite some time.
hard-to-maintain
Please at least read a book on C++/OOP before knocking it. You've convinced me with this one that you really don't know much about C++ or OOP in general. C++ is far easier to maintain than C. It's whole structure is designed for this very purpose, and it succeeds at this quite well.
(Can you tell I feel strongly about this?)
Yes, I just wish you'd reseach a subject before forming an opinion on it. OOP is not the answer to everything, but it does not suffer from the things you claim it does. Java might, but that's for other resons entirely. If you'd work with C++ for any length of time on any large scale project, you might learn to appreciate it.
The trouble with the USA is the overwhelming number of small minded individuals who arrogantly pass judgement on civilizations and cultures that dare to suggest that
maybe the USA should think a bit about the rest of the world for a change
The trouble with the rest of the world is the overwhelming number of small minded individuals who arrogantly assume that a vocal minority of small minded Americans justifies stereotyping the rest of the population. I for one am sick of listening to Europeans whining about how evil America is. We've got our problems, just like everyone else, but we're no worse than anyone else either.
...is a law against pouring hot grits down your pants :)
In a few years, people will look at it and wonder where the heck *that* came from.
Um, I was about to suggest you do the same thing when I read this. I find it hard to believe you've ever read them and can actually claim what you do about the 2nd ammendment. First of all, "State" does not refer to any of the individual states that make up the union. "State" in its most proper sense refers to a nation as a whole. In this light, to say that the State is responsible for regulating the militia makes no sense. The "security of the free State" is, in fact, the security of the freedoms of the nation as a whole. If you read the Federalist Papers, and other writings by the Founders, you quickly realize that the greatest threat they envisioned to the security of this free State was not any outside power, but the government itself. If it was their intent to have the militia regulated by the State, then they would be granting it control over the body that was intended to keep it in check. This would require a monumental feat of stupidity. The 2nd ammendment does, indeed, grant the citizens of the US the right to bear arms. You mentioned in another post that the Supreme Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution. This is correct, but misleading. For all legal purposes, the Supreme Court is responsible for deciding the stance of the Constitution, but that does not mean that their interpretation is the correct one. If the Supreme Court decided tomorrow that "Hey, we were wrong all along... there really isn't anything about the freedom of speech in the Constitution, then we would be legally bound by that interpretation. But they'd still be wrong. Even if the Supreme Court decided that the 2nd ammendment didn't protect the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms(which, last I checked, they hadn't), they wouldn't be right. We'd be legally bound by their decision, but to say they were right in their interpretation would be to ignore two centuries of contrary interpretations. Those who founded this country clearly believed this right was protected by the 2nd ammendment, and, since they did sort of write the thing, I'm inclined to believe them, regardless of what the Supreme Court says tomorrow.
I'm not sure why this theory violates God's Law. Please explain. I haven't read through it yet (I'm assuming you have) so I can't say that for sure, but from the abstract, I don't see where you find offense with it. Any clarification would be appreciated.
I assume, of course, that you've proven this, since nobody would even consider posting something on /. that they couldn't prove. Please post the proof here. I'm sure it was just an oversight that it wasn't posted originally.
experimentally prove or disprove His existance and properties?
This has bugged me for years. At what point can we say we've explained everything that exists? Is it possible to explain the existance of physical laws or mathematics, since such an explanation would not be able to rely on them (in other words, they can't explain their own existance) To explain why mathematics works the way it does, we have to develop a theory to explain how it arose from nothing, without using math to create the theory. I don't think this is possible. You criticize him for putting forth God as the Uncaused Cause (not that his message didn't deserve plenty of criticism), but then ask what physical laws determine His existance. Are you not, therefore, putting forth these Physical Laws as an Uncaused Cause? Are you willing to accept the idea that the laws of physics and mathematics have no origin, and simply exist without cause, or do you believe that it is somehow possible for them to arise from true nothingness?
I am a Christian today due, in part, to this very question. I have not yet heard an adequate explanation. I realize that Christianity doesn't explain it, since we accept the idea that God can exist without cause. It just seems to me that this makes more sense than saying that abstract ideas and laws can exist without cause. Any thought anyone has on this would be appreciated.
Perhaps our current understanding of the nature of the universe is incapable of describing the things you mentioned. String theory, while focused on unification, also redefines many of our beliefs about our universe. It may be that it is necessary to continue developing this theory, assuming it is on the right track, before we can even hope to understand the points you mentioned. For starters, I believe that string theorists have claimed that they may have a solution to the dark matter problem - something they came across while developing the theory without any thought for finding a solution to this particular problem. Now, it may be that this is just another false lead, but you can't deny the fact that many of the discoveries we have made in Physics first required a complete overhaul of our previous understandings of the universe.
Keep reading... they're now saying 10 spatial dimensions, and 1 temporal. It seems that with the extra spatial dimension, the various string theories (Type I, Type IIa, Type IIb, Heterotic type O(32) and Heterotic type E8 x E8) turn out to be "reflections" of each other, and a new theory, called M-theory, is starting to emerge from it... but I don't want to spoil the book for you ;)
My question is, and I think this might have been asked in Elegant Universe, is: Is it possible that some of these extra dimensions are actually temporal dimensions, and not spatial dimensions? i.e., might we live in a Universe with 6 spatial dimensions and 5 temporal dimensions? I'm curious as to how extra temporal dimensions might behave...
String theory has always had it's critics. There are plenty of PhDs who don't find it at all absurd.
Yes, excellent book. Michio Kaku has written a number of excellent books. I'd also recommend Beyond Einstein. It was one of the first I'd ever read on the subject. About Time by Paul Davies is also excellent, though not entirely on topic for this discussion. If you like the others though, it will probably be of great interest to you. You just have to get through the first few chapters where he discusses various mystical beliefs surrounding the nature of time - I found that a bit annoying.
Heh... got that book right in front of me :) It really is an excellent book, and quite current. I'd definately recommend it.
String theory is far from dead. It's currently evolving into what is called M-theory (basicly, it's a combination of the various approaches to string theory) Progress is a bit slow, but there's a reason they say string theory is 21st century physics that just happened to be discovered in the 20th century. The mathematics behind it are well beyond what anyone is currently capable of dealing with - at best, they can only come up with approximate solutions to approximate equations. (YOU try working out the mathematical equations to describe the physical principles of 6 extra dimensions folded up in a Calabi-Yau space) String theory has always had its critics, but it has survived thus far simply because it has such an enormous potential for explaining our universe. Don't discount it.
Although I'm certainly pleased with the finding of facts, a small part of me was hoping the judge would find in favor of MS. I like the fact that Linux has made the gains it has based solely on its merits. It never needed the DoJ to get this far. I realize that without government intervention it would have been a slow uphill battle all the way, but, while this doesn't mean that M$ is just going to disappear overnight or anything like that, I can't help but wonder if there will be those who accuse Linux of needing the DoJ to compete against Windows. It seems that we might find ourselves having to defend any gains we make based on technical superiority against accusations that Linux wouldn't be able to compete without help. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but given M$'s massive PR machine, they could easily twist this in any number of ways.
All this is assuming, of course, that the actuall ruling is more than just a slap on the wrist. We may see absolutely no change if they settle or the ruling is watered down.
I actually found it a bit annoying. It just has never sounded right to me. I was using Linux long before I ever heard it refered to as GNU/Linux, so I doubt it will ever sound right. I don't really have a problem with those who prefer to call it that, though I do tend to roll my eyes whenever I hear it. Those who insist it should be called GNU/Linux do tend to bug me quite a bit though.
I say we take the world's slowest NT machine from a few articles back and run some benchmarks on it against this new toy :) Let's see MS put *those* benchmarks on their website :) But I think NT would beat Linux out in the TCO department on that one ;)
Vending machines are evil anyway. Avoid them. I have declared a personal jihad against the vending machines in one of the lounges here on campus. I swear the local satanist group offers human sacrifices to these things on a daily basis. They are constantly devouring my money, and giving nothing in return. They are EVIL! But I will be victorious in my war against them. It's just a matter of time.
what's the point? Most people I know who have any clue about what they're doing just assemble their own systems. The others... use Windows. Who are they trying to target here? If the average user sees that it doesn't have Windows, I seriously doubt he'd even consider buying it. I think these types of people are by far their largest customer base. I don't see this as having any effect on Microsoft.
I can't believe these people can maintain any credibility when Cerf gets elected over Al Gore. Now I realize that he has made his contributions an all, but lets face it - he's hardly the father of the Internet. Anyone who knows what they are talking about will tell you that Big Al is the real father of the Internet. C'mon people, at least research the subject before reporting on it.
I say we make our voices heard. If we're to have only one representative on the board, it has to be Al. Lose the Cerf guy.