Many times when I hear "think of the children!!" arguments, I conclude that the situation wouldn't be a problem if the parents were ACTUALLY PARENTING.
Or stopped being obsessed about their kid not seeing any sex or violence. It's not going to kill them or damage them or pervert them unless they're the victim. And even then they are likely to survive it and be okay eventually.
Kids are a lot tougher than people tend to give them credit for. It's the parents who seem suspectible for this crap.
I know that parents can't watch their children 24/7, but this just seems like it is making it easier for parents to sit their children in front of some box (computer instead of TV this time) and take a minimalistic approach to parenting.
To be fair, you are a lot less likely to get hurt sitting in front of a computer or TV than you are running around outside.
No. I simply think that the terrorists in question are aiming at starting a genocide. They aren't there yet, but they want to get there.
If Al Qaeda wanted to slaughter the infidels, they'd just DO it. There are more than enough Americans living abroad that they could kill thousands every month.
I meant he wants to kill all non-muslims from the world - make it completely dominated by Islam. Killing a few thousand americans per month is not going to accomplish that, no matter how long you continue that. No, it requires genocide - and that requires a war. So, to the best of my understanding, Al-Qaeda is trying to start a major war, World War Three. The infidels will perish in flames and only the righteous mass murderers will be spared and inherit the land, etc.
That's the problem when you have an apocalyptic religion (or any ideology where the world becomes a paradise as soon as something gets accomplished): sooner or later someone will get the bright idea of helping that apocalyse on its way.
So what we see is that Bin Laden has accomplished precisely the opposite of anything that is, from the perspective of Islamic extremists, positive. Radical Islam has taken a severe blow; there is now MORE democracy and LESS Islamic theocracy in the world. Being a muslim is on about the same level as having leprosy throughout most of the world. The "holy land" is being trampled by boots that have "Made in America" written in relief in the sole.
Except that, for Osama's goals, this is a good thing. Remember, he thinks he has God on his side, so he can't lose; all he has to do is get the war started, and victory is assured. And the more suffering he can bring upon the muslims, the closer he gets to that goal. Nothing helps religious fervor quite like a few martyrs, or a few hundred thousand as the case may be here, and seeing your holy sites trampled by the boots of your enemies.
The problem with your analysis is that you're assuming Osama's goals are political. They are not. They are religious. Consequently, they make no sense from purely political perspective, but do make perfect sense from the point of view of a religious fanatic operating on apocalyptic agenda and delusions of righteousness.
Someone explain to me why Slashdot has so many people who are afraid to death of cameras?
Well, I can't talk for anyone else, but I'm just plain ugly - overweight and pasty-white. Now, I'm starving myself, lifting weights (I can already almost lift the mouse from the table !!!) and forcing myself to open the curtains for at least 1 minute each day while the Sun is up, so I hope I'll be an athlete in a few months and can attract girls like flies. But imagine if, just when I'm picking one up in a restaurant, my competitor comes up with an old picture of me buying potato chips for a meal (at night, of course) in all my 200-kilogram glory - that would really ruin the mood, y'know ?
So that's the reason: I don't want anyone to be able to come up with video footage of me being young and foolish 20 years later. Which, if I'm being recorded by the Big Brother every time I step outside my home, will be easy to do. I want to live my life without having to watch every word and gesture least they return later to haunt me.
Before you argue 'big brother', '1984', etc. you should take note that public photography is a valuable right in the US (http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm). Why then should make the police's job harder by taking away that right from them?
Please understand that there's a world of difference between being subject to constant video surveillance everywhere you go which is archived for all eternity (or at least for your lifetime) and being photographed every now and then. Please also understand that police can be too effective; if it becomes able to catch every criminal, then it can enforce any law, no matter how unpopular, therefore paving the way for tyranny.
* Doofuses? Just look how well that has worked out for their feelow Muslims... their 70 virgins are probably going to turn out to be 70 desperate truckers with a taste for the dark meat...
You are making an incorrect assumption here: that the purpose of Osama was to benefit his fellow muslims. It was not. It was to destroy the "infidels" (meaning every non-muslim, but especially the USA). The way to do that (in his mind) is to start a jihad, a holy war. Now which one is more likely to throw their life away in a suicide attack: someone who's kids have just been killed by US occupational forces, or someone who's busy bringing them up ?
Osama bin Laden is an evil man, a monster who's perfectly willing to inflict suffering and death to his fellow muslims to serve his ends. He is not, however, stupid. He made a trap, and Bush walked right into it. Bush is the doofus here. Or maybe I'm underestimating him, and he's just playing the same game as Osama...
You just defeated your own argument. Yes, visual and audio entertainment is necessary for humans, but as you so nicely stated there are alternatives to recorded music, and movies. I think you're severely underestimating the human desire for entertainment, and overestimating the importance of mass media.
Bored people will find ways to entertain themselves. The problem is that those ways oeften aren't very well thought out, nor neccessarily very nice to other people. A good example is the classical hooligan who beats up people and destroys property for fun.
It's like this: when you have a small elite and a huge amount of disempowered people with no real hope of making it to the elite, you either give those masses bread and circuses or they start talking with each other. At first it's just idle chitchat, but soon it's going to turn into how much better off they would be if the elite was torn down, and before you know it you have a rebellion. The roman emperors understood this and Rome lasted for centuries; the modern-day overlords would do well to copy this little detail on top of the excesses, corruption and iron-fisted oppression they already have.
I, for one, wouldn't miss our current corporate overlords, but I wouldn't want to get caught in the middle of a fight between them and a bloodthirsty lynch mob either.
Only kids who don't get enough love an attention CAN be drawn out by a vector.
Anyone who has any needs or wants whatsoever can be drawn out by a vector. People, even children, have needs and wants beyond getting love and attention; curiosity, for example: "I live in a really neat house, want to come see it ?" from a sexual predator pretending to be a 13-year old is every bit as effective (or ineffective - I'm not a sexual predator nor marketroid so I don't know how to market effectively to a 13-year old) on a kid who's being doted upon than one who's not.
The kid who is getting enough love and attention doesn't have the time for strangers- their time is taken up by their immediate family.
Then logically any kid who has friends isn't getting enough love and attention at home, since she's obviously had enough time to meet and befriend strangers.
But please tell me, what happens when that kid who's used to overwhelming love and attention moves out and can't get it anymore from her parents ? Where does she go looking for it ? And what will likely result ?
You don't need to be a kid to have bad things happen to you.
If the parents figure out a way that at least one parent is avaiable to the kids *all of that time* and is inventive enough to find activities *that fit the child's interests* to do *with* them, then there won't be any time for meeting strange men at the mall.
So what happens when those kids get to have some free unprogrammed time - which will happen when they move out of home, at the latest - and have no practice in neither entertaining themselves nor dealing with other people or life in general without a referee, assuming they haven't gone stark raving mad from being monitored and therefore having to watch all they say, do or think all their life of course ?
Nice job yourself replying to a statement never made. The "moron"'s comment didn't compare a poster here to another poster in another thread. The "moron" noted that highly-rated comments in other threads express views that are possibly inconsistent with the highly-rated comments in this thread.
Amazingly enough Slashdot not only has more than 1 poster, it also has more than 1 moderator. Please also note that not everyone reads every single article, leading to different articles having different audiences. There is no conflict.
/. isn't a hive mind, but in aggregate, the moderation reflects a collective opinion.
No it doesn't. Moderating a comment highly does not mean that you agree with the opinions expressed in it, it simply means that the comment contributes to the discussion. You may well disagree with a comment and still consider it insighful, if it for example showed you another way of looking at things.
All I'm getting to is, that even if parents both work (like mine), they could in the past raise a child that could be trusted and had responsibility. I'm asking why parents today cannot seem to do that same.
Because they no longer leave their kids home alone with a loaded gun, therefore not giving natural selection a chance to do its work, so even the unresponsible and stupid ones survive to adulthood ?
Unless, of course, you consider MySpace the modern day gun-equivalent.
What I've never understood about this restriction of consumers rights, is what the fuck makes music and movies so different from any other product you can buy?
They have bought more lawmakers than most industries.
If I buy a cucumber from Wal-Mart, it's probably expected that I'm going to use it in a sandwich or a nice salad. But if I decide I want to stick it up my ass and waggle it about for cheap thrills, I don't have to pay extra for it. It's my vegetable, and I can do what I want with it.
This is because cucumber makers are honest businessmen (or farmers, whichever definition you prefer), getting their living from their work. The entertainment industry, on the other hand, is utterly useless. You need food, be them cucumbers or anything else; you don't need entertainment, you can entertain yourself quite well - go jog, write a book, draw a picture, program, or just lie in your bed and daydream.
The worst nightmare of entertainment industry is for the average consumer to wake up and become a producer. With the Internet and P2P (BitTorrent), distribution no longer requires a huge capital investment; with powerful general purpose computers and associated modern technology (digital cameras, image- video- sound- and 3D editing software, etc) production is no longer an unsurmountable problem either. The only advantage left for MAFIAA is the cult of personality built around some actors and musicians; and even that is under attack with the Internet decentralizing information and advertizement channels and giving everybody a voice that can be heard anywhere in the world - this message, for example, is likely to be read in several different continents.
Cucumber farmers are working for a living, while the MAFIAA is simply a parasite. That's why the cucumber people can afford to relax and concentrate on their work, while the MAFIAA is jumping at shadows and tightening their grip as much as possible.
But if I download a music track, they want me to pay to be able to use it in any other way than was intended. Why does the entertainment industry have special status and a perceived right (in their view) to be paid 5 different ways for the same day's work?
As mentioned above, the entertainment industry is fighting for its life. It will lose; the only question is how much damage it will do first, both to the individuals caught in its lawsuits and bought laws, and to technology in general by preventing interoperability and retarding innovation.
Think back to the mid-late 80s and how much CPU power or silicon would've been needed to deal with character sets and interpreting or skipping over text.
None. The CD spec already includes seeking predefined points (tracks). Simply include in the spec that the first track will always contain the text data and sound tracks begin from track 2, and the players that don't want to deal with it can just skip it. Better yet, mark each track with a single byte specifying the type, and if the player doesn't recognize the type it just skips over that track.
And let's not forget that the 80386 microprocessor was introduced 1985. It wasn't exactly stone age anymore. This time of graphical user interfaces, abstraction layers over abstraction layers and other wasteful technologies makes one forget how truly powerful even 8086 actually was: 1 million byte memory and 4 million clock cycles per second. That's easily efficient enough to control a LED display with a few letters on it, and available cheap at that time. And, like I said, all you need to do if you don't want to deal with the extra info is to skip over the first track.
I think you misspelled "fuck." If you're going to curse, do it properly!
Thanks for the mental image. Zoofilia and necrofilia and the Goatse Man are bad thing, especially in combination, but to do the MAFIAA... That's just wrong.
If it kills 99.9999% of the virus, would the same conclusion apply? If so, is there anything that kills 100% of any virus, guaranteed?
Yes, many things. A common candle flame, for example, will kill all carbon-based lifeforms that are immersed in it for long enough. The problem is that you are a carbon-based lifeform.
My attitudes toward moderates: if I say 2 + 2 = 4, and you say it's 6, does the truth "lie in the middle?"
Understanding that your political views, no matter how self-evident they may seem to you, are not equivalent to mathemathical truths is an important step towards maturity and the ability to have useful discussion about politics, since it removes the implication that the people who disagree with you are either too stupid to know how to count or evil enough to lie despite knowing better. Perhaps the US will attain this level of maturity someday...
Because they are clueless they don't understand that "free" could equal bad. TANSTAAFL comes to mind. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Robert Heinlein was prescient to many issues we face today.
Sure there is. For example, when a corporation one of my relatives works in got new computers, they gave me one of their old ones. I got a server for my home network and they got rid of their old junk without having to pay for recycling. Win-win, free lunch.
There are plenty of free lunches when the society becomes so rich that they throw away perfectly functional equipment to get a better replacement. Our cities have large populations of animals who grow fat on our garbage - heck, the city I live in has larger population density of nonhuman species than any forest I've ever seen.
As long as you don't demand the best and newest, but are willing to wait a few years, the chances are that you can get it for free, and whoever gives it to you will thank you for taking it off his hands.
This would force the prosecutors to actually prove the accused person hunted down and downloaded, or solicited the transmission of, the files, rather than just that the files were on his machine. That's a much tougher job for the prosecutors.
After that they could tackle the little problem of mislabeled files. If you download "knitting instructions and a demonstration.mpeg" and it turns out to be child porn in reality, are you guilty ? After all, you did authorize the transfer, but thought you were getting a video of someone showing you how to make clothes.
Of course this makes it impossible to convict downloaders and still get no false positives. If we want to keep the principle of "better a hundred guilty men walk free than one innocent be wrongly punished", then I don't think we can go after downloaders. It's just impossible to prove them guilty beyond reasonable doubt. So it might be neccessary to concentrate all efforts on makers instead.
Not that any of this matters, since Child Porn is a political subject, one where it's easy to get political points, and that makes rational thinking about the problem impossible. It's the equivalent of Nuclear Power, Communism and Drugs for the new millenium.
Is this honestly the best troll you could come up with ? What is wrong with you people - don't you even try anymore ?
Trolls aren't what they used to be. But then again, I guess being made into a twisted parody of nature enslaved to Morgoth by a second rate hobbyist fantasy author and be forced to remember your time as a relatively benign mythological being from Scandinavian folklore all your miserable existence would do that to you, I guess. And the movie trilogy, which makes mockery of both your original and Tolkien-corrupted nature, would certainly not help.
See ? That's a troll. It combines trivia, imflammatory opinions, and a condescending tone with at least some creativity. That's how it's done. "Go fuck yourself, loser"... Bah.
And moderators: The best comments are always, invariably, drawn out as responses to the worst trolls (sometimes the story itself). Slashdot needs quality trolls. A quality troll is one that hits where it hurts, and provokes people to answer in detail with eloquence and passion. It helps hone your own views to the razor's edge as only a worthy foe can. Without them, Slashdot would be nothing more than a bunch of people congratulating each other over their l33tn3s. "Go fuck yourself, loser" is not a good troll, it doesn't mentally challenge even the dimmest-witted steroid-using old boxer. So mod up good trolls, and mod down garbage like the post I answered to.
No where in the article can I see anything which prevents the wiki system from failing miserably any less than a database system, it'll just be slightly less organised (and therefor useful) if it does actually work.
Wiki is a database, you insensitive clod !
More specifically a Wiki is a database frontend which makes data entry and editing easy, provides automatic versioning, and allows links between articles to make it easy to check related data. As such, it is not "less organised" than any other database, just easier to use than raw SQL - but if you want raw SQL on the underlaying database, go ahead.
Second of all, it's not as if you could handle any random DTD. Software doesn't work that way. (this is one of the reasons why XML itself is a mostly-lame idea)
Sure you can. Just show it to the user as-is. It's just a hieararchical tree of text nodes, he should be able to make at least some sense of it. That's one of the reasons why XML is such a cool idea:).
As a side note, that's what Firefox does when it encounters an XML file it doesn't have a stylesheet for.
Only if the government increases the money supply. If a company pays their employees more, it doesn't. This is regardless of who in the company get how much of the increase.
If the total money supply doesn't change, and one company gets more of it, then that must be away from other companies and people. So it might be that these particular employees migh be slightly better off, but Joe Average Employee is worse off. And in fact the employees of the company might be worse off too, if the CEO uses his newfound wealth to get a disproportionate amount of some limited resource for himself.
My economics department tried very hard to think of a way harm a country with money.
[...]
Apart from printing gobs of it and causing inflation--which only the treasury can do--we couldn't think of anything.
Bribe politicians into passing laws that are outrageously unfair in your favor. D'uh !
Alternatively, get control of the entire supply of some resource (food, oil, coal, electricity...) and use artificial scarcity to drive the prices up, like deBeers have done with diamonds. Or simply create a new banking system, with a currency backed by the resource you now control, and take control of the economy.
I mean, what f--king retard puts a "kill gas" switch in easy reach of a pilot in the air? Can you name *ANY* scenario where it is an advantage to kill the fuel flow while in the air?
The engine catches fire ? Not that that justifies putting the switch where it's easy to hit it by accident, not putting any kind of safety device (a button you need to push to move it, or something like that) on it, and not coloring it yellow with black stripes and a text with large red letters right next to it saying: "DANGER! Engine kill switch!" with a grinning skull drawn around it for emphasis.
hey are on record as stating that life (human life) starts at conception, which is why they oppose any harvesting of stem cells from embryos that are about to be destroyed.
This, however, has nothing to do with "God says don't kill babies". It is simply a matter of trying to decide when you have something that counts as a baby.
I note they deftly side-step the issue of whether destroying them in the first place is wrong.
Well, they believe that killing babies is wrong because they believe God said so. Not much of an issue there - someone either believes that or not. As for the question of when life begins, if you absolutely have to have a single point, conception seems least arbitrary.
Of course there is always the possibility that it's impossible to clearly define the point where life begins. Nature, in general, seems to hate being divided into neat little boxes:).
That's another whole argument that could go on for thousands of postings and brings in more worms than you can crush with a tank.
The cynicist in me points out that this is likely at least part of the reason why politicians argue about it in the first place - save the children, and make a lot of noise in the process, and you're re-elected since people can't recall the details, just that you "saved the children".
Why existing lines are "OK", and new ones not boggles the logical mind.
That, actually, is perfectly logical: the embryos the existing lines were taken from are already dead and can't get any deader, while any new lines would require destroying new embryos. It's not the stem cell line that's immoral in their mind, it's the act required to obtain it in the first place.
I'd think this is true of any group that wants to control a larger group. There are only a few proven methods to do so: controlling force, indoctrination, and subjugation by various means. That fundamentalists use one or more of these methods does not make others that use them fundamentalist.
It's the willingness to resort to these methods, of putting the ideology before the people who get hurt in the process, that makes these groups fundamentalistic. That's what fundamentalism is: an unshaking conviction that you're right and everyone who disagrees is either evil, stupid or mad. And what do you do to such people ? Why, you shoot them, re-educate them, or send them to mental institutions, respectively. Just like the russians did.
But I agree that proving the non-existance of something is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task.
In the case of an omnipotent supernatural being it is certainly impossible, since such a being could (by definition) simply hide from any such test.
Take heaven, for example. It's "up", but apparently we can never get there by going "up", because "up" is essentially infinite, so the argument would always be "it's further up". Yet our dear departed can travel "down" to watch "over" us.
You do realize, of course, that this is all entirely metaphorical ? If the concept of Heaven was invented/revelead today, people would think "another dimension" or something. On the other hand, if it was thought to be an actual place in this universe but not on this world, then to reach it you'd obviously need to go way up;).
Besides, most religions I know off don't teach that the ghosts of dead people are in the habit of returning to their old haunts, altought some do.
Wait, there's this speed of light thing... oh, they're not limited by the laws of physics... It all starts to sound like magic to me.
There is a burning theater when the group in power is saying "God doesn't want you killing babies" as they ban embryonic stem cell research on a purely religious basis.
You're conveniently forgetting that there's two assumptions at work here: "God doesn't want you killing babies" and "embryos are babies or equal to babies". The latter doesn't logically follow from the former.
And in any case, assuming you're talking about the US Government, it didn't ban stem cell research, it merely refused to fund it.
I see the art of the metaphor is lost on you.
Not at all. Making metaphors likening your opposition to fire or other destructive phenomenons is a practical application of the logical fallacy/rethorical tactic of poisoning the well. It is also a time-honored method various fundamentalists of every ilk use to whip themselves and their followers into a frenzy and disperse doubts. Metaphors like yours don't promote understanding, they are simply a rethorical trick to make your opposition look bad.
Did I miss anything important ?
The above is one case, others would be things like the theory of evolution being "challenged", the entire "idol" destruction thing (The Taliban among others - who says we need to keep this restricted to christians in the US?) the complete subjugation of women (Several arabian, asian, and african countries) the complete brain-washing of children (take your pick on this one, all fundamentalists practice this to some extent, the most blatant occurring currently in sectors of the US, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, some forcefully such as the Ivory Coast)
All of this is very true. However, you're forgetting that fundamentalism is not limited to religion. Take Soviet Russia, for example: the state was officially atheist, yet it had no trouble subjugating its own citizens and brainwashing children.
Basically, you're listing the fruits of human nature, not religion.
Speaking out against these things is good, as it lets people know that there are alternatives. It keeps mob rule in check, by allowing people to step outside the mob, and hopefully contain it. Of course, there are risks in speaking out against something like this, which is why those with qualities commonly associated with fundamentalists are usually the ones to speak out.
It is certainly good to speak out against the excesses of any ideology or religion. But you seem to be agreeing with me that the vocal atheists share many qualities of a fundamentalist, then ?
Lastly, most everyone that speaks out believes they're right.
Except lawyers, politicians and astroturfers;).
Note that those speaking out against Intelligent Design/Creationism/etc mostly do not paint the other side as idiots,
To be fair, the (young earth) creationists I've spoken (well, e-mailed) to do appear to be either trolls or idiots. And Intelligent Design, of course, is not a scientific theory since it is impossibly to test and doesn't generate any predictions.
There's not much helping that when your most effective argument is to state that Christian creationism has no more validity than the world on the back of a turtle myth, or Gaea and Uranus creating the world as we know it, or any of the hundreds of other creation myths.
Quite true. You can't prove any of them. You can't prove any of them false, either. Which is why taking the position that all of them are false, and trying to convince other people of that, is similar to taking a position that any is correct and trying to convince other people of that. That's the reason why some people keep on claiming that atheism is a religion: active atheism requires believing an unprovable position (that there is no God).
If PayPal should do anything, it should be to admit some data entry drone made a mistake and take actions to correct it. Their "180 day" policy does nothing to ensure compliance, it only nets them 6 months of interest.
In other words, that's exactly what they should do. After all, as people often point out here in Slashdot, a company only has responsibility to maximize shareholder value - which usually means maximizing profits. And if evil things like this maximize it, so be it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or stopped being obsessed about their kid not seeing any sex or violence. It's not going to kill them or damage them or pervert them unless they're the victim. And even then they are likely to survive it and be okay eventually.
Kids are a lot tougher than people tend to give them credit for. It's the parents who seem suspectible for this crap.
To be fair, you are a lot less likely to get hurt sitting in front of a computer or TV than you are running around outside.
No. I simply think that the terrorists in question are aiming at starting a genocide. They aren't there yet, but they want to get there.
I meant he wants to kill all non-muslims from the world - make it completely dominated by Islam. Killing a few thousand americans per month is not going to accomplish that, no matter how long you continue that. No, it requires genocide - and that requires a war. So, to the best of my understanding, Al-Qaeda is trying to start a major war, World War Three. The infidels will perish in flames and only the righteous mass murderers will be spared and inherit the land, etc.
That's the problem when you have an apocalyptic religion (or any ideology where the world becomes a paradise as soon as something gets accomplished): sooner or later someone will get the bright idea of helping that apocalyse on its way.
Except that, for Osama's goals, this is a good thing. Remember, he thinks he has God on his side, so he can't lose; all he has to do is get the war started, and victory is assured. And the more suffering he can bring upon the muslims, the closer he gets to that goal. Nothing helps religious fervor quite like a few martyrs, or a few hundred thousand as the case may be here, and seeing your holy sites trampled by the boots of your enemies.
The problem with your analysis is that you're assuming Osama's goals are political. They are not. They are religious. Consequently, they make no sense from purely political perspective, but do make perfect sense from the point of view of a religious fanatic operating on apocalyptic agenda and delusions of righteousness.
Well, I can't talk for anyone else, but I'm just plain ugly - overweight and pasty-white. Now, I'm starving myself, lifting weights (I can already almost lift the mouse from the table !!!) and forcing myself to open the curtains for at least 1 minute each day while the Sun is up, so I hope I'll be an athlete in a few months and can attract girls like flies. But imagine if, just when I'm picking one up in a restaurant, my competitor comes up with an old picture of me buying potato chips for a meal (at night, of course) in all my 200-kilogram glory - that would really ruin the mood, y'know ?
So that's the reason: I don't want anyone to be able to come up with video footage of me being young and foolish 20 years later. Which, if I'm being recorded by the Big Brother every time I step outside my home, will be easy to do. I want to live my life without having to watch every word and gesture least they return later to haunt me.
Please understand that there's a world of difference between being subject to constant video surveillance everywhere you go which is archived for all eternity (or at least for your lifetime) and being photographed every now and then. Please also understand that police can be too effective; if it becomes able to catch every criminal, then it can enforce any law, no matter how unpopular, therefore paving the way for tyranny.
You are making an incorrect assumption here: that the purpose of Osama was to benefit his fellow muslims. It was not. It was to destroy the "infidels" (meaning every non-muslim, but especially the USA). The way to do that (in his mind) is to start a jihad, a holy war. Now which one is more likely to throw their life away in a suicide attack: someone who's kids have just been killed by US occupational forces, or someone who's busy bringing them up ?
Osama bin Laden is an evil man, a monster who's perfectly willing to inflict suffering and death to his fellow muslims to serve his ends. He is not, however, stupid. He made a trap, and Bush walked right into it. Bush is the doofus here. Or maybe I'm underestimating him, and he's just playing the same game as Osama...
Bored people will find ways to entertain themselves. The problem is that those ways oeften aren't very well thought out, nor neccessarily very nice to other people. A good example is the classical hooligan who beats up people and destroys property for fun.
It's like this: when you have a small elite and a huge amount of disempowered people with no real hope of making it to the elite, you either give those masses bread and circuses or they start talking with each other. At first it's just idle chitchat, but soon it's going to turn into how much better off they would be if the elite was torn down, and before you know it you have a rebellion. The roman emperors understood this and Rome lasted for centuries; the modern-day overlords would do well to copy this little detail on top of the excesses, corruption and iron-fisted oppression they already have.
I, for one, wouldn't miss our current corporate overlords, but I wouldn't want to get caught in the middle of a fight between them and a bloodthirsty lynch mob either.
Anyone who has any needs or wants whatsoever can be drawn out by a vector. People, even children, have needs and wants beyond getting love and attention; curiosity, for example: "I live in a really neat house, want to come see it ?" from a sexual predator pretending to be a 13-year old is every bit as effective (or ineffective - I'm not a sexual predator nor marketroid so I don't know how to market effectively to a 13-year old) on a kid who's being doted upon than one who's not.
Then logically any kid who has friends isn't getting enough love and attention at home, since she's obviously had enough time to meet and befriend strangers.
But please tell me, what happens when that kid who's used to overwhelming love and attention moves out and can't get it anymore from her parents ? Where does she go looking for it ? And what will likely result ?
You don't need to be a kid to have bad things happen to you.
So what happens when those kids get to have some free unprogrammed time - which will happen when they move out of home, at the latest - and have no practice in neither entertaining themselves nor dealing with other people or life in general without a referee, assuming they haven't gone stark raving mad from being monitored and therefore having to watch all they say, do or think all their life of course ?
Amazingly enough Slashdot not only has more than 1 poster, it also has more than 1 moderator. Please also note that not everyone reads every single article, leading to different articles having different audiences. There is no conflict.
No it doesn't. Moderating a comment highly does not mean that you agree with the opinions expressed in it, it simply means that the comment contributes to the discussion. You may well disagree with a comment and still consider it insighful, if it for example showed you another way of looking at things.
Because they no longer leave their kids home alone with a loaded gun, therefore not giving natural selection a chance to do its work, so even the unresponsible and stupid ones survive to adulthood ?
Unless, of course, you consider MySpace the modern day gun-equivalent.
They have bought more lawmakers than most industries.
This is because cucumber makers are honest businessmen (or farmers, whichever definition you prefer), getting their living from their work. The entertainment industry, on the other hand, is utterly useless. You need food, be them cucumbers or anything else; you don't need entertainment, you can entertain yourself quite well - go jog, write a book, draw a picture, program, or just lie in your bed and daydream.
The worst nightmare of entertainment industry is for the average consumer to wake up and become a producer. With the Internet and P2P (BitTorrent), distribution no longer requires a huge capital investment; with powerful general purpose computers and associated modern technology (digital cameras, image- video- sound- and 3D editing software, etc) production is no longer an unsurmountable problem either. The only advantage left for MAFIAA is the cult of personality built around some actors and musicians; and even that is under attack with the Internet decentralizing information and advertizement channels and giving everybody a voice that can be heard anywhere in the world - this message, for example, is likely to be read in several different continents.
Cucumber farmers are working for a living, while the MAFIAA is simply a parasite. That's why the cucumber people can afford to relax and concentrate on their work, while the MAFIAA is jumping at shadows and tightening their grip as much as possible.
As mentioned above, the entertainment industry is fighting for its life. It will lose; the only question is how much damage it will do first, both to the individuals caught in its lawsuits and bought laws, and to technology in general by preventing interoperability and retarding innovation.
None. The CD spec already includes seeking predefined points (tracks). Simply include in the spec that the first track will always contain the text data and sound tracks begin from track 2, and the players that don't want to deal with it can just skip it. Better yet, mark each track with a single byte specifying the type, and if the player doesn't recognize the type it just skips over that track.
And let's not forget that the 80386 microprocessor was introduced 1985. It wasn't exactly stone age anymore. This time of graphical user interfaces, abstraction layers over abstraction layers and other wasteful technologies makes one forget how truly powerful even 8086 actually was: 1 million byte memory and 4 million clock cycles per second. That's easily efficient enough to control a LED display with a few letters on it, and available cheap at that time. And, like I said, all you need to do if you don't want to deal with the extra info is to skip over the first track.
Thanks for the mental image. Zoofilia and necrofilia and the Goatse Man are bad thing, especially in combination, but to do the MAFIAA... That's just wrong.
Yes, many things. A common candle flame, for example, will kill all carbon-based lifeforms that are immersed in it for long enough. The problem is that you are a carbon-based lifeform.
Understanding that your political views, no matter how self-evident they may seem to you, are not equivalent to mathemathical truths is an important step towards maturity and the ability to have useful discussion about politics, since it removes the implication that the people who disagree with you are either too stupid to know how to count or evil enough to lie despite knowing better. Perhaps the US will attain this level of maturity someday...
...Any century now... ;)
Sure there is. For example, when a corporation one of my relatives works in got new computers, they gave me one of their old ones. I got a server for my home network and they got rid of their old junk without having to pay for recycling. Win-win, free lunch.
There are plenty of free lunches when the society becomes so rich that they throw away perfectly functional equipment to get a better replacement. Our cities have large populations of animals who grow fat on our garbage - heck, the city I live in has larger population density of nonhuman species than any forest I've ever seen.
As long as you don't demand the best and newest, but are willing to wait a few years, the chances are that you can get it for free, and whoever gives it to you will thank you for taking it off his hands.
After that they could tackle the little problem of mislabeled files. If you download "knitting instructions and a demonstration.mpeg" and it turns out to be child porn in reality, are you guilty ? After all, you did authorize the transfer, but thought you were getting a video of someone showing you how to make clothes.
Of course this makes it impossible to convict downloaders and still get no false positives. If we want to keep the principle of "better a hundred guilty men walk free than one innocent be wrongly punished", then I don't think we can go after downloaders. It's just impossible to prove them guilty beyond reasonable doubt. So it might be neccessary to concentrate all efforts on makers instead.
Not that any of this matters, since Child Porn is a political subject, one where it's easy to get political points, and that makes rational thinking about the problem impossible. It's the equivalent of Nuclear Power, Communism and Drugs for the new millenium.
Is this honestly the best troll you could come up with ? What is wrong with you people - don't you even try anymore ?
Trolls aren't what they used to be. But then again, I guess being made into a twisted parody of nature enslaved to Morgoth by a second rate hobbyist fantasy author and be forced to remember your time as a relatively benign mythological being from Scandinavian folklore all your miserable existence would do that to you, I guess. And the movie trilogy, which makes mockery of both your original and Tolkien-corrupted nature, would certainly not help.
See ? That's a troll. It combines trivia, imflammatory opinions, and a condescending tone with at least some creativity. That's how it's done. "Go fuck yourself, loser"... Bah.
And moderators: The best comments are always, invariably, drawn out as responses to the worst trolls (sometimes the story itself). Slashdot needs quality trolls. A quality troll is one that hits where it hurts, and provokes people to answer in detail with eloquence and passion. It helps hone your own views to the razor's edge as only a worthy foe can. Without them, Slashdot would be nothing more than a bunch of people congratulating each other over their l33tn3s. "Go fuck yourself, loser" is not a good troll, it doesn't mentally challenge even the dimmest-witted steroid-using old boxer. So mod up good trolls, and mod down garbage like the post I answered to.
Slashdot needs (+1, Troll) besides (-1, Troll).
Wiki is a database, you insensitive clod !
More specifically a Wiki is a database frontend which makes data entry and editing easy, provides automatic versioning, and allows links between articles to make it easy to check related data. As such, it is not "less organised" than any other database, just easier to use than raw SQL - but if you want raw SQL on the underlaying database, go ahead.
Sure you can. Just show it to the user as-is. It's just a hieararchical tree of text nodes, he should be able to make at least some sense of it. That's one of the reasons why XML is such a cool idea :).
As a side note, that's what Firefox does when it encounters an XML file it doesn't have a stylesheet for.
If the total money supply doesn't change, and one company gets more of it, then that must be away from other companies and people. So it might be that these particular employees migh be slightly better off, but Joe Average Employee is worse off. And in fact the employees of the company might be worse off too, if the CEO uses his newfound wealth to get a disproportionate amount of some limited resource for himself.
Bribe politicians into passing laws that are outrageously unfair in your favor. D'uh !
Alternatively, get control of the entire supply of some resource (food, oil, coal, electricity...) and use artificial scarcity to drive the prices up, like deBeers have done with diamonds. Or simply create a new banking system, with a currency backed by the resource you now control, and take control of the economy.
The engine catches fire ? Not that that justifies putting the switch where it's easy to hit it by accident, not putting any kind of safety device (a button you need to push to move it, or something like that) on it, and not coloring it yellow with black stripes and a text with large red letters right next to it saying: "DANGER! Engine kill switch!" with a grinning skull drawn around it for emphasis.
This, however, has nothing to do with "God says don't kill babies". It is simply a matter of trying to decide when you have something that counts as a baby.
Well, they believe that killing babies is wrong because they believe God said so. Not much of an issue there - someone either believes that or not. As for the question of when life begins, if you absolutely have to have a single point, conception seems least arbitrary.
Of course there is always the possibility that it's impossible to clearly define the point where life begins. Nature, in general, seems to hate being divided into neat little boxes :).
The cynicist in me points out that this is likely at least part of the reason why politicians argue about it in the first place - save the children, and make a lot of noise in the process, and you're re-elected since people can't recall the details, just that you "saved the children".
That, actually, is perfectly logical: the embryos the existing lines were taken from are already dead and can't get any deader, while any new lines would require destroying new embryos. It's not the stem cell line that's immoral in their mind, it's the act required to obtain it in the first place.
It's the willingness to resort to these methods, of putting the ideology before the people who get hurt in the process, that makes these groups fundamentalistic. That's what fundamentalism is: an unshaking conviction that you're right and everyone who disagrees is either evil, stupid or mad. And what do you do to such people ? Why, you shoot them, re-educate them, or send them to mental institutions, respectively. Just like the russians did.
In the case of an omnipotent supernatural being it is certainly impossible, since such a being could (by definition) simply hide from any such test.
You do realize, of course, that this is all entirely metaphorical ? If the concept of Heaven was invented/revelead today, people would think "another dimension" or something. On the other hand, if it was thought to be an actual place in this universe but not on this world, then to reach it you'd obviously need to go way up ;).
Besides, most religions I know off don't teach that the ghosts of dead people are in the habit of returning to their old haunts, altought some do.
I believe the common term is "supernatural" ;).
There isn't much poin
You're conveniently forgetting that there's two assumptions at work here: "God doesn't want you killing babies" and "embryos are babies or equal to babies". The latter doesn't logically follow from the former.
And in any case, assuming you're talking about the US Government, it didn't ban stem cell research, it merely refused to fund it.
Not at all. Making metaphors likening your opposition to fire or other destructive phenomenons is a practical application of the logical fallacy/rethorical tactic of poisoning the well. It is also a time-honored method various fundamentalists of every ilk use to whip themselves and their followers into a frenzy and disperse doubts. Metaphors like yours don't promote understanding, they are simply a rethorical trick to make your opposition look bad.
Did I miss anything important ?
All of this is very true. However, you're forgetting that fundamentalism is not limited to religion. Take Soviet Russia, for example: the state was officially atheist, yet it had no trouble subjugating its own citizens and brainwashing children.
Basically, you're listing the fruits of human nature, not religion.
It is certainly good to speak out against the excesses of any ideology or religion. But you seem to be agreeing with me that the vocal atheists share many qualities of a fundamentalist, then ?
Except lawyers, politicians and astroturfers ;).
To be fair, the (young earth) creationists I've spoken (well, e-mailed) to do appear to be either trolls or idiots. And Intelligent Design, of course, is not a scientific theory since it is impossibly to test and doesn't generate any predictions.
Quite true. You can't prove any of them. You can't prove any of them false, either. Which is why taking the position that all of them are false, and trying to convince other people of that, is similar to taking a position that any is correct and trying to convince other people of that. That's the reason why some people keep on claiming that atheism is a religion: active atheism requires believing an unprovable position (that there is no God).
In other words, that's exactly what they should do. After all, as people often point out here in Slashdot, a company only has responsibility to maximize shareholder value - which usually means maximizing profits. And if evil things like this maximize it, so be it.