OK, if it's "proven," point out all this oh-so-overwhelming "proof" you have.
I'm willing to bet all you have is conspiracy theorist speculation just like every other kook out there. No credible source has said a single thing to back up anything you've said; though Shourd was politically active it was as a pro-Palestinian campaigner, not as a "US agent." She was released because there were signs she was developing cancer and would die in custody; this would have sparked international outrage, and Iran faces enough of that already.
Even Noam Chomsky, who's all-too-happy to take any opportunity he can get to trump up ridiculous anti-American propaganda, forcefully advocated that these folks be released on lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
Hikers and adventurers end up in all kinds of ridiculous places all over this globe. That some hikers would go to Kurdistan is not surprising in the slightest.
Louisiana is losing ground fast. Some parishes will be almost entirely water pretty soon; the basic problem is that the way we're artificially keeping the Mississippi's course stable is sending all the silt off the continental shelf when it should be helping to reinforce the delta.
Maybe to mitigate the inevitable cost of cleaning that state up the next time a hurricane blows through we should give strong incentives for people to move to NM where the ground is growing rather than getting eroded into the ocean.
There's a bigger problem there than just basic functionality (obvious things like wordcount, fullscreen mode, etc) being missing from the free of charge open source edition. If that were the only problem, I'd be happy to pay for the extensions as a way to support the project.
The trouble is that if you have basic functionality missing from an open-source project any additional developers you manage to attract will likely want to work on fixing that. Then Glazman will be in the sticky position of deciding whether to refuse patches because they compete with his add-on products or accept them anyways. If he rejects them, this will stunt the growth of a developer community and possibly end up causing a fork. If he accepts them, there goes his business model, and he may not be able to continue developing it himself. Either way, I don't think the current model makes sense for the future of the project.
Maybe either a crowdfunding ("when $X has been pledged this functionality will be added") or blender.org-style ("though it's available as closed-source payware right now, when $X has been pledged it will be open-sourced") model could work better than the current "freemium" model.
I wrote him an email about this and never got a response. I worry about the project's future.
Whatever you may think the core of the cause you're espousing is, if you really want to allow people the freedom to choose, "secularism" is the wrong word. Secularism as an ideal was born out of the French Revolution's persecution of Catholics; ever since then secularism has involved a government hostility towards religion which at least tries to bar religious peoples' voices from the public sphere (extremely anti-democratic) and usually extends to various other kinds of persecution.
If you think the French Revolution was about "the dignity of human life, rejecting oppression and supporting freedom and free will" then you need to go back to high school history class and try again. How much did the revolutionaries care about the dignity of human life? Enough to guillotine ~40,000 people without trial. How much did the revolutionaries care about freedom of thought and free will? Enough to outlaw public and private worship and religious education, to beat women in the streets for trying to attend Mass, and to outlaw the word "Sunday", the ringing of church bells, and displays of the cross; enough to force priests to give up their vows and to simply kill thousands of them; enough to institute the "Cult of Reason" and then the "Cult of the Supreme Being" as established religions; enough to kill ~400,000 people in the Vendée for refusing to provide 300,000 conscripts to fight for a cause the citizens of the Vendée almost universally opposed (this has been called the first modern genocide). The atrocities were far too numerous for me to list here.
The revolutionaries paid lip service to the so-called Enlightenment values, but people enjoyed more human dignity, less oppression, and more freedom of thought and speech during just about any other period of French history than they did during 1789-1799.
See these wikipedia articles on the most recent common ancestor and identical ancestor point for everyone in the world. Our most recent common ancestor is almost certainly considerably more recent than a biblical Adam (~4000BC). The identical ancestor point could well have been that recent. (IAP is the point in time when everybody who was living is either an ancestor of all mankind or has no living descendants.)
Of course, the stark difference from strict biblical literalists is that our pool of ancestors hasn't been fewer than ~10,000 for a very very long time. An Adam would have had at least a million contemporaries, many of whom would also be everyone's common ancestors.
Back on topic, the worry about hereditary influences in presidential politics is certainly vastly overstated, as connections between people in the relatively small US population over the course of three hundred years are easy to find. Finding such connections between presidents and then claiming that those relationships have any causal connection to their having been presidents is a clear instance of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
True. But it was slightly less pathetic, and it had been improving a little too. Once MS Office started to dominate, grammar checkers stagnated completely for 15 years.
Amen. Another reason to bemoan the fact that MS Office (with its inferior grammar stuff which never has really been improved) took over the world.
Just in the last few years faint glimmers of innovation in grammar checking started to appear after a 15-year hiatus. For instance, LanguageTool, the Link grammar being used as a checker, and a few commercial tools with hints of new ideas.
Maybe within a few years some of these tools will actually deliver major improvements.
An office suite can't be "small" and "lightweight" and have all "the pro features I might need, too." You sound just like Agnes in Simpson Safari: you want all your groceries in one bag, but you don't want the bag to be heavy.
You can get lightweight, fast office software; for example, you can use AbiWord for your word processing needs. But it doesn't have every feature under the sun, and if it did have every pro feature anybody "might need" it wouldn't be lightweight.
Unless a lot of things about this project change it is pretty much doomed. (Well, doomed to be ignored by everybody outside of IBM; they can finance their own Symphony devs, but nothing else will come of this unless things change.)
If you glance at the Apache openoffice mailing lists, a few things become clear:
Rob Weir, who is basically running the show and who seems like a perfectly reasonable person from his blog, acts like a caustic, sarcastic, and poorly socialized adolescent in communicating with other developers. He's alienating people right and left. People have tried to get him to stop, but he either ignores it or just acts like it's those he's offended who are to blame for any unpleasantness.
Due to Rob's attitude and other unfortunate factors, any chance of gaining cooperation from anyone who's been involved in LibreOffice has pretty much evaporated. If there'd been a little bit of diplomacy, I bet a lot of people would have been OK with dual-licensing their patches for Apache OO to use as well, and the two projects could have gotten a lot of mutually beneficial effort in support, security, localization, language tools, and extensions; AOO folks have instead opted to prioritize insulting LibreOffice folks over getting anything done.
They tore a lot of functionality out of OpenOffice for their license compliance crusade. I can understand that they can't ship copylefted code, but tearing out the use of LGPL'ed libraries seems kind of ridiculous. (For me personally, the loss of WordPerfect import is going to force me to LibreOffice.)
Apache OpenOffice 3.4 won't be released until the middle of next year-- the first OO release since this January, with relatively little improvement over OO 3.3 and a fair bit of missing functionality-- LibreOffice will have gone through three "major" releases and another dozen point releases, fixing a lot of bugs, refactoring a lot of code, and introducing a few new features. AOO will have taken roughly a full year (June 2011-2012) to make their first code shipment and people will have long since moved on.
I really wanted to see Apache OpenOffice succeed and become the main branch; I think that for a project like OO, having either a permissive license or copyright assignment to a well-governed nonprofit (as with GNU software) is a really wise idea. But I can't see them making much progress as things stand.
Though I respect what Reformed churches have accomplished, I think Calvinism has resulted in a very distorted picture of God. A God who arbitrarily chooses to save some and to damn others can hardly be called just or loving.
Instead, God's will is to "have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:4)
While it certainly is true that no one could be saved by their own merits and all are reliant on Christ, if it were only up to God's election, he'd save everyone. But instead He's given us free will to accept or reject the salvation from sin He offers, and many would rather- at least for the present- hold on to their sins than let go and be redeemed.
If you "want to follow Him to some extent" but have "wavering intentions," I would say this is not a sign that your ground is irrevocably thorny or stony but rather a normal part of the struggle we face as we try to turn to the Savior. As you strive to act on and strengthen your resolve to follow Him and as you try to starve your contrary intentions, you open the door at which the Savior is knocking (Rev. 3:20). Christ's power will cleanse you, give you a new heart and a new spirit, and make of you a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17). It's not that we achieve this change on our own but that we have to choose to "make room for" Him to do so.
All who strive to follow Christ are involved in this process of being purified and made holy through His grace. None of those on the earth, including those who could be called elect, have already achieved a state of perfection where they never have any desires or intentions to the contrary (cf Paul in Romans 7:14-25), though as Christ works in us those desires will weaken and we may have moments or even extended periods when we truly have no desire to do evil.
As to Eph 2:8-10, it's true that as the process of sanctification advances we gain a strength in faith which we could not have achieved on our own and we must acknowledge that any power we have to continue in good works is given of God. But God did not (and, given his gift of free will, cannot) foist this faith and this power on us contrary to our wills. We had to choose to let Him change us.
Look, having been in the military has nothing to do with anything. Sure, you may have taken some risks, but those risks have nothing to do with the risks taken by Russian protesters (likely to be jailed just for showing up in a public square) and opposition figures (likely to be assassinated by grotesque means like Politkovskaya or Litvinenko).
Thanks for your service and all, but I'm sorry if what you learned from it was to be a total jerkwad.
Bull. In most cities, OWS folks who got arrested were trying to get arrested. They'd been warned well in advance that though protesting was fine the tent cities could no longer be tolerated (rampant sanitation issues, crime, and the nuisance to locals) and they should clear out their personal belongings. This was after cities had been lenient towards about two months of camping in places where camping is not legally allowed.
Many people decided to clean out their tents, find another place to sleep, and continue to gather for daytime and evening protests; daytime protests continued well after the tent city evictions and in most cities these protests faced no police intervention. Others wanted to defy the police and get arrested "for the cause" -- they stayed in their tents and got their wish. Other arrests have mostly been for completely blocking roadways, business entrances, etc, deliberately trying to make it impossible for other citizens to go about their normal business.
Sure, police actions in making the arrests and in clearing the camps haven't been great, but the protesters put the police in a tough spot where they had to use some force to enforce the law.
This is nothing like the protests in Russia where people are arrested en masse just for showing up in a public square and voicing their opinion.
*Sigh* here we go again with the false equivalence squad.
If you can't see why your "hurr durr so is amerikuh" statement is a bunch of crap, let's make the following deal: I'll go stand in an anti-government protest here in the States, and you go stand in Red Square with those protesting Putin's latest power grab.
If we're lucky, you'll be able to write letters from prison telling us how it went.
Up till recently I would have recommended PacketProtector, which has a lot of useful features including Snort, DansGuardian, and ClamAV integration. But both because OpenWRT, which it was based on, has lagged in hardware support and because the main developer's work and Masters are eating up all his time, it's kind of stagnated. If one or two people were to pick up some of the slack it could again be a fantastic solution.
Your fears are misplaced. Though plenty of pollution is (very regrettably) dumped into the oceans, the ocean is an extremely huge place volume-wise and the low density of pollutants in ocean water will not really affect your food.
(Well, there are a couple of chemicals, notably mercury, which are subject to biomagnification, i.e. things higher up the food chain get all the mercury from everything below them on the food chain; these can reach perceptible levels esp. if you're eating one kind of food all the time. Enough to be a little concerned but not enough to paranoiacally avoid ever eating any seafood.)
If you're concerned about chemicals affecting your food, you'd be much better off to be concerned about the pesticides, industrial pollutants, etc affecting land-based food sources (and fish from lakes and rivers); terrestrial water sources and topsoil have a much much lower volume than the ocean and absorb at least much chemical pollution. (And biomagnification happens with land creatures too.) So you really should consider never eating any land-based food again either.
If you're worried about nuclear radiation affecting your food, you'd do better to start worrying about the great unshielded nuclear reactor in the sky. Your danger of getting cancer from solar radiation is incomparably greater than your danger from Fukushima etc, even if you exclusively eat Japanese fish and stay indoors 24/7.
Just saying that the machines it's running on will all be finite doesn't buy you anything over analyzing behavior on a TM with its infinite tape; you'd have to have a bound on the amount of storage available to all the computers it will ever run on.
To put this another way: you could enumerate all the possible states it could enter when running on a particular machine. But that only tells you about the behavior of the program on that machine, not about the semantics of the program. The program could always be run on a computer with more memory/storage space, and the new computer has 2^(number of additional bits) times as many possible configurations.
(In particular, the computer you're running the analysis on has to have 2^(number of bits available to the computer the program would be running on) bits available. It would take a similarly exponentially stronger machine to analyze how the program would behave if it were run on that machine, and so on ad infinitum. No program could be written to analyze its behavior across all machines in this chain since otherwise you'd be able to solve the halting problem.)
You probably already know this, but Rice's Theorem etc only apply to supposed decision procedures. It's quite possible to write a program which will often recognize that other programs have some nontrivial semantic property (halting, having a particular kind of bug, etc) and will decide correctly on a broad class of real-world programs. You just can't write one which will always give you a yes or no answer in finite time and always be right.
Everyone in the civilized world is worried about what will happen if terrorists gain access to this technology. That's why most nations have signed the Fire Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it's why the International Combustive Energy Agency is working round-the-clock to keep this technology from falling into the wrong hands (while somehow also promoting civilian use of combustive energy).
You've got to be a lot more careful about talking about such restricted technology and its possible uses.
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They weren't even in Iran. They were apprehended on the Iraqi side of the border.
OK, if it's "proven," point out all this oh-so-overwhelming "proof" you have.
I'm willing to bet all you have is conspiracy theorist speculation just like every other kook out there. No credible source has said a single thing to back up anything you've said; though Shourd was politically active it was as a pro-Palestinian campaigner, not as a "US agent." She was released because there were signs she was developing cancer and would die in custody; this would have sparked international outrage, and Iran faces enough of that already.
Even Noam Chomsky, who's all-too-happy to take any opportunity he can get to trump up ridiculous anti-American propaganda, forcefully advocated that these folks be released on lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
Hikers and adventurers end up in all kinds of ridiculous places all over this globe. That some hikers would go to Kurdistan is not surprising in the slightest.
Louisiana is losing ground fast. Some parishes will be almost entirely water pretty soon; the basic problem is that the way we're artificially keeping the Mississippi's course stable is sending all the silt off the continental shelf when it should be helping to reinforce the delta.
Maybe to mitigate the inevitable cost of cleaning that state up the next time a hurricane blows through we should give strong incentives for people to move to NM where the ground is growing rather than getting eroded into the ocean.
There's a bigger problem there than just basic functionality (obvious things like wordcount, fullscreen mode, etc) being missing from the free of charge open source edition. If that were the only problem, I'd be happy to pay for the extensions as a way to support the project.
The trouble is that if you have basic functionality missing from an open-source project any additional developers you manage to attract will likely want to work on fixing that. Then Glazman will be in the sticky position of deciding whether to refuse patches because they compete with his add-on products or accept them anyways. If he rejects them, this will stunt the growth of a developer community and possibly end up causing a fork. If he accepts them, there goes his business model, and he may not be able to continue developing it himself. Either way, I don't think the current model makes sense for the future of the project.
Maybe either a crowdfunding ("when $X has been pledged this functionality will be added") or blender.org-style ("though it's available as closed-source payware right now, when $X has been pledged it will be open-sourced") model could work better than the current "freemium" model.
I wrote him an email about this and never got a response. I worry about the project's future.
*shudder*
While he did ask what could go wrong I imagine he was talking about minor things like security trouble and arrests, not major catastrophes like that.
Whatever you may think the core of the cause you're espousing is, if you really want to allow people the freedom to choose, "secularism" is the wrong word. Secularism as an ideal was born out of the French Revolution's persecution of Catholics; ever since then secularism has involved a government hostility towards religion which at least tries to bar religious peoples' voices from the public sphere (extremely anti-democratic) and usually extends to various other kinds of persecution.
I'll give a little background by quoting a previous discussion:
That's laïcité for you.
See these wikipedia articles on the most recent common ancestor and identical ancestor point for everyone in the world. Our most recent common ancestor is almost certainly considerably more recent than a biblical Adam (~4000BC). The identical ancestor point could well have been that recent. (IAP is the point in time when everybody who was living is either an ancestor of all mankind or has no living descendants.)
Of course, the stark difference from strict biblical literalists is that our pool of ancestors hasn't been fewer than ~10,000 for a very very long time. An Adam would have had at least a million contemporaries, many of whom would also be everyone's common ancestors.
Back on topic, the worry about hereditary influences in presidential politics is certainly vastly overstated, as connections between people in the relatively small US population over the course of three hundred years are easy to find. Finding such connections between presidents and then claiming that those relationships have any causal connection to their having been presidents is a clear instance of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
True. But it was slightly less pathetic, and it had been improving a little too. Once MS Office started to dominate, grammar checkers stagnated completely for 15 years.
Amen. Another reason to bemoan the fact that MS Office (with its inferior grammar stuff which never has really been improved) took over the world.
Just in the last few years faint glimmers of innovation in grammar checking started to appear after a 15-year hiatus. For instance, LanguageTool, the Link grammar being used as a checker, and a few commercial tools with hints of new ideas.
Maybe within a few years some of these tools will actually deliver major improvements.
but we all know it's really just Vegemite.
This also answers the question about how toxic this is. The answer is "very-- except to Australians, they've built up an immunity."
An office suite can't be "small" and "lightweight" and have all "the pro features I might need, too." You sound just like Agnes in Simpson Safari: you want all your groceries in one bag, but you don't want the bag to be heavy.
You can get lightweight, fast office software; for example, you can use AbiWord for your word processing needs. But it doesn't have every feature under the sun, and if it did have every pro feature anybody "might need" it wouldn't be lightweight.
Unless a lot of things about this project change it is pretty much doomed. (Well, doomed to be ignored by everybody outside of IBM; they can finance their own Symphony devs, but nothing else will come of this unless things change.)
If you glance at the Apache openoffice mailing lists, a few things become clear:
I really wanted to see Apache OpenOffice succeed and become the main branch; I think that for a project like OO, having either a permissive license or copyright assignment to a well-governed nonprofit (as with GNU software) is a really wise idea. But I can't see them making much progress as things stand.
Though I respect what Reformed churches have accomplished, I think Calvinism has resulted in a very distorted picture of God. A God who arbitrarily chooses to save some and to damn others can hardly be called just or loving.
Instead, God's will is to "have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:4)
While it certainly is true that no one could be saved by their own merits and all are reliant on Christ, if it were only up to God's election, he'd save everyone. But instead He's given us free will to accept or reject the salvation from sin He offers, and many would rather- at least for the present- hold on to their sins than let go and be redeemed.
If you "want to follow Him to some extent" but have "wavering intentions," I would say this is not a sign that your ground is irrevocably thorny or stony but rather a normal part of the struggle we face as we try to turn to the Savior. As you strive to act on and strengthen your resolve to follow Him and as you try to starve your contrary intentions, you open the door at which the Savior is knocking (Rev. 3:20). Christ's power will cleanse you, give you a new heart and a new spirit, and make of you a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17). It's not that we achieve this change on our own but that we have to choose to "make room for" Him to do so.
All who strive to follow Christ are involved in this process of being purified and made holy through His grace. None of those on the earth, including those who could be called elect, have already achieved a state of perfection where they never have any desires or intentions to the contrary (cf Paul in Romans 7:14-25), though as Christ works in us those desires will weaken and we may have moments or even extended periods when we truly have no desire to do evil.
As to Eph 2:8-10, it's true that as the process of sanctification advances we gain a strength in faith which we could not have achieved on our own and we must acknowledge that any power we have to continue in good works is given of God. But God did not (and, given his gift of free will, cannot) foist this faith and this power on us contrary to our wills. We had to choose to let Him change us.
Look, having been in the military has nothing to do with anything. Sure, you may have taken some risks, but those risks have nothing to do with the risks taken by Russian protesters (likely to be jailed just for showing up in a public square) and opposition figures (likely to be assassinated by grotesque means like Politkovskaya or Litvinenko).
Thanks for your service and all, but I'm sorry if what you learned from it was to be a total jerkwad.
Bull. In most cities, OWS folks who got arrested were trying to get arrested. They'd been warned well in advance that though protesting was fine the tent cities could no longer be tolerated (rampant sanitation issues, crime, and the nuisance to locals) and they should clear out their personal belongings. This was after cities had been lenient towards about two months of camping in places where camping is not legally allowed.
Many people decided to clean out their tents, find another place to sleep, and continue to gather for daytime and evening protests; daytime protests continued well after the tent city evictions and in most cities these protests faced no police intervention. Others wanted to defy the police and get arrested "for the cause" -- they stayed in their tents and got their wish. Other arrests have mostly been for completely blocking roadways, business entrances, etc, deliberately trying to make it impossible for other citizens to go about their normal business.
Sure, police actions in making the arrests and in clearing the camps haven't been great, but the protesters put the police in a tough spot where they had to use some force to enforce the law.
This is nothing like the protests in Russia where people are arrested en masse just for showing up in a public square and voicing their opinion.
*Sigh* here we go again with the false equivalence squad.
If you can't see why your "hurr durr so is amerikuh" statement is a bunch of crap, let's make the following deal: I'll go stand in an anti-government protest here in the States, and you go stand in Red Square with those protesting Putin's latest power grab.
If we're lucky, you'll be able to write letters from prison telling us how it went.
Translation: "I'm not bright enough to think about orbital dynamics, so I'll just try to start an offtopic religion-bashing troll thread instead."
Up till recently I would have recommended PacketProtector, which has a lot of useful features including Snort, DansGuardian, and ClamAV integration. But both because OpenWRT, which it was based on, has lagged in hardware support and because the main developer's work and Masters are eating up all his time, it's kind of stagnated. If one or two people were to pick up some of the slack it could again be a fantastic solution.
Your fears are misplaced. Though plenty of pollution is (very regrettably) dumped into the oceans, the ocean is an extremely huge place volume-wise and the low density of pollutants in ocean water will not really affect your food.
(Well, there are a couple of chemicals, notably mercury, which are subject to biomagnification, i.e. things higher up the food chain get all the mercury from everything below them on the food chain; these can reach perceptible levels esp. if you're eating one kind of food all the time. Enough to be a little concerned but not enough to paranoiacally avoid ever eating any seafood.)
If you're concerned about chemicals affecting your food, you'd be much better off to be concerned about the pesticides, industrial pollutants, etc affecting land-based food sources (and fish from lakes and rivers); terrestrial water sources and topsoil have a much much lower volume than the ocean and absorb at least much chemical pollution. (And biomagnification happens with land creatures too.) So you really should consider never eating any land-based food again either.
If you're worried about nuclear radiation affecting your food, you'd do better to start worrying about the great unshielded nuclear reactor in the sky. Your danger of getting cancer from solar radiation is incomparably greater than your danger from Fukushima etc, even if you exclusively eat Japanese fish and stay indoors 24/7.
I've been saying the same thing for years.
"Of course everything here is organic. Do you see me serving you a bowl of sand?"
"Mmm, basalt. Crunchy."
Just saying that the machines it's running on will all be finite doesn't buy you anything over analyzing behavior on a TM with its infinite tape; you'd have to have a bound on the amount of storage available to all the computers it will ever run on.
To put this another way: you could enumerate all the possible states it could enter when running on a particular machine. But that only tells you about the behavior of the program on that machine, not about the semantics of the program. The program could always be run on a computer with more memory/storage space, and the new computer has 2^(number of additional bits) times as many possible configurations.
(In particular, the computer you're running the analysis on has to have 2^(number of bits available to the computer the program would be running on) bits available. It would take a similarly exponentially stronger machine to analyze how the program would behave if it were run on that machine, and so on ad infinitum. No program could be written to analyze its behavior across all machines in this chain since otherwise you'd be able to solve the halting problem.)
You probably already know this, but Rice's Theorem etc only apply to supposed decision procedures. It's quite possible to write a program which will often recognize that other programs have some nontrivial semantic property (halting, having a particular kind of bug, etc) and will decide correctly on a broad class of real-world programs. You just can't write one which will always give you a yes or no answer in finite time and always be right.
Just curious- why the Caiaphas quote from John 11?
See also United States v. Prometheus for more about the penalties for divulging such classified information.
Everyone in the civilized world is worried about what will happen if terrorists gain access to this technology. That's why most nations have signed the Fire Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it's why the International Combustive Energy Agency is working round-the-clock to keep this technology from falling into the wrong hands (while somehow also promoting civilian use of combustive energy).
You've got to be a lot more careful about talking about such restricted technology and its possible uses.