What if they get up in a burning theater and keep yelling "fire" to those ignoring the flame and smoke? Would you still say they're exhibiting many of the signs of fundamentalism? Or are these merely qualities, like breathing and sleeping, that they happen to have in common? (Note: this is not saying there aren't insane idiots in both camps, but when you're faced with loudly proclaimed blatant assertions as truth, vocal opposition does need to exist)
No. They aren't. But people making these kind of analogies, which liken religion to a fire in a theater and religious people to idiots who can't notice fire and smoke around themselves, certainly are:).
There is nothing wrong with being vocal about the truth, no matter how much some people don't want to hear about it.
This being the "I'm right and everyone who disagrees is either mad, stupid or evil" part. Or possibly the "Only us select few know the truth, and everyone else is just too blind to see, so we must guide these poor bastards" part.
Getting your panties into a bunch because other people believe in God (or pink unicorn, or Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever) and you don't is a sign that you're taking the whole thing too seriously. Loosen up. There is no burning theater here. Don't try to cast yourself as a hero of some sort and religion as dragon to be slain or a fire to be put out; that is the essence of fundamentalism.
Perhaps its time to stop the Linus-worship anyway, and go with the HURD:
From the page you linked, under "Status of the project":
GNU Mach 1.3 was released in May 2002, and features advanced boot script support, support for large disks (>= 10GB) and an improved console.
GNU Mach is used as the default microkernel in the GNU/Hurd system. It is compatible with other popular Mach distributions. The device drivers for block devices and network cards are taken from Linux 2.0.x kernel versions, and so a broad range of common hardware is supported.
I think we can safely conclude that Hurd is not quite ready for primetime yet;). And seriously, will likely never be, since Linux is draining the developer pool. Hurd isn't dying, it's stillborn.
All that was there though was a local only elevation of privs (where an authenticated user logged on to the box can get admin rights). Not good of course, but far from a DoS...
On the contrary, keeping in mind that Vista includes DRM I think it's very good that Vista security is at the usual Microsoft level. It may chain the user, but the chains are made from recycled tin cans, the links are hollow to save material, and the lock pops open when anyone looks at it funny:).
I guess the one thing that can overcome greed and evil is incompetence...
Yes, atheism is a religion in exactly the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Atheism may not be a religion, but vocal atheists - those who feel the need to tell everyone they're atheists - certainly seem to have an emotional investment in their position, exhabiting many of the signs of fundamentalism: "I'm right and everyone who disagrees is either mad, stupid or evil".
In other words, it is impossible for an atheist to show either statement "X is morally right" or "X is morally wrong" right or wrong for any X.
The exact same thing is true for religion. Prove to me that your God actually said "X is right" or "X is wrong". Wait, you can't, can you? There's no way for you to prove that God made that decree, as opposed to, say, some nutjob trying to rebel against the oppression of the Romans.
This raises up one of the fundamental differences between religion and atheism: in religion, you don't need to prove everything, you can take things on faith.
Or, to put it a bit less flippantly: no one believes in just "God", without adding some attributes to that. These attributes typically take the form of that god having said or done something. Every religion (that has a god - not all of them do) has a set of things all who are considered part of that religion believe their god (and usually prophets or some other people too) did or said.
A theistic worldview has absolute truths (an therefore absolute morality), while an atheistic one doesn't.
Worse, in the case of religion, people happily pick and choose their morality. For example, people say "I can eat shellfish because the NT obsoletes the Pentateuch". Then they turn around and condemn gays based on Leviticus.
I never claimed that religious people would neccessarily or even likely be nice, moral or logical.
Therefore, the argument that "god said so, therefore it's moral" is merely an appeal to an arbitrary authority, and is no better than saying "Kant said so, therefore it's moral". They're on the exact same footing.
Are we talking atheists anymore, then, or Kant-worshippers ?-)
'course, the difference is the latter is at least grounded in some kind of rational, philosophical reasoning... as opposed to, say, rules which ban the creation of clothing from two different fibres.
Unfortunately, rationality and philosophy are unable to provide a base for morality. You still need to make the basic value judgements before you can start building anything on them, and atheism gives no tools for making them.
Yes. All morality ultimately comes down to someone saying that something is right or wrong. Religion has an absolute authority figure capable of giving absolute moral rules, atheism doesn't. Therefore, a religious type can say that something is fundamentally right or wrong while staying consistent, while an atheist can't; lack of absolute authority also means lack of absolute values, since there's nothing capable of dictating them.
A theist can say "This is wrong because God says so", while an atheist can only say "This is wrong because I say so", or "because Kant says so". However, the atheist could always change his mind, and it would be impossible to consider his new opinion of right and wrong any better or worse than the previous one.
In other words, it is impossible for an atheist to show either statement "X is morally right" or "X is morally wrong" right or wrong for any X. It is impossible, because there is no moral principle he could deduce it from without first having to prove (deduce from other principles - but then they must be shown correct) or arbitrarily declare that principle correct. It's a bit like trying to decide which direction is up without an external gravity field: pick any, it's as good as any other.
An atheist can pick any set of moral values he pleases, without there being any way to consider one set better another (without resorting to assuming pre-existing moral values, in which case you need to show there they come from). What most atheists end up picking are the values their own social instincts and upbringing instilled on them, giving them sufficient morality that they are not a danger to others; however, following those values is not - from an atheistic viewpoints - inherently any better or worse than emulating Hannibal Lecter.
That's what I'm trying to get to, in my long-winded way. By denying the existence of God or gods an atheist also denies the existence of universal values since there are no entities with authority to set any and the natural world in itself doesn't have any; consequently, any moral judgement made by an atheist are just his personal opinions depending on his personal tastes and cannot therefore be fundamental.
To put it very simply: You either follow someone's rules or you don't. If you don't, you're free to do whatever you want. A theist has someone to get rules from (God), atheist doesn't. Therefore an atheist doesn't have any basis for choosing a particular morality over any other, besides social pressure and force of habit.
For the reasons mentioned above, atheism makes morality a meaningless concept; any imaginable behavior is equally moral under atheism, since there's no basis to judge one more or less moral than another. Consequently, an atheist declaring somethign "fundamentally wrong" is one who either hasn't thougt about the consequences of his position, or has and has decided that integrity and consistency are not amongst his values;).
Kant's Categorical Imperative does a pretty good job of atheistically summing up an ethical system.
"Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law."
Yes... Except that this is just Kant arbitrarily deciding that following this principle is morally better than not following it and following some other principle, say, "I can do anything as long as I'm not caught".
In other words, it fails to address the core issue at all.
On a different note, I take it that you're religious, and that you believe that anyone who does not believe in a god cannot be moral?
As I specifically stated that they can, yours is a somewhat strange comment. All I'm arguing is that atheism is unable to provide any kind of basis for moral, since it denies the existence of anything beyond the natural world and the natural world is not inherently moral, not any individual atheists actually having no moral.
Yes, I understand that I'm making something of a straw man here, but I personally do not rape and kill my mother, yet I do not believe in any gods. I believe that raping and killing one's mother is wrong, because if everybody raped and killed their mother, society would be... rather different.
Certainly. But you are making the - entirely arbitrary - assumption that Kant was right, and that everyone will emulate you.
Yet you don't rape and kill your mother because the god that you believe in threatens you with eternal pain and you are scared of him.
By your own words, the only reason you don't do bad things to your mother is that you're afraid of the consequences if everyone decides to emulate you. So perhaps you might be a little less condescending ?
Which one of us is "moral"?
Both, since both have moral rules. That is not the point. Please read the message again.
You misread that. Why are acreage and CPU requirements linked, as opposed to CPU cycles used and CPU requirements?
What happens to your bill in the latter scenario when you get slashdotted ? And dare you risk it ?
The thing is, you can easily measure space, even virtual space; but you can't possibly know how many CPU cycles something is going to use in the future. So you either pay up a certain sum beforehand, and risk the thing going down if it's not enough, or pay for used CPU time afterwards and risk going backrupt.
Besides, if you pay per CPU time used, you need to keep paying, since CPU is used every time someone visits; the more things you make, the more you pay. Not a good way of getting content producers to sign up, especially since they can just use the good old Web to display theri stuff far cheaper.
I can be an atheist and still think abortion is fundamentally wrong
Not really. What would make it so ? Not god, since an atheist denies the existence of one. Nor laws of physics, since they - being purely mechanical - don't care. Not society, since that ultimately just means that some people arbitrarily decided that something is wrong - arbitrarily, since they have no higher moral authority to base their decision on, there being no higher moral authority in atheism - and not yourself, since that is just you deciding something is wrong without anything to back that decision besides your personal tastes for the reasons mentioned previously.
An atheist really shouldn't talk about right and wrong - and certainly not about "fundamental" right and wrong - since they simply have no meaning in a godless, purely physical world. "Beneficial" and "harmful" might be useful replacements, but they obviously raise the question "to whom ?".
Now let's see how many people flame me with "I'm an atheist and a moral person!", completely missing my point: that since there is no being in atheism capable of authoritatively declaring one set of moral values better than others, and since nature is unable to do so either, "moral behavior" can in atheism be defined by any person any way they want with no one being able to show any reason why that definition would be any better or worse than any other definition; consequently, any behavior is just as moral in atheism as any other (since it's always possible to make up a moral code justifying it, even if that code only says "I can do whatever I want, but the rest of you can't"), which of course means that the word "moral" has no meaning in atheism.
Luckily, most atheists still follow the religion-derived values of the society around them, being unable or unwilling to take their belief - or lack of belief, whatever viewpoint you prefer - to its logical conclusion, and so stay productive or at least non-destructive members of society. And luckily most religious people don't take seriously every weird half-baked phisolophy various theologians with too much time on their hands have added to it over the centuries, especially the parts about killing anyone who disagrees on anything with religious leaders. Laziness is the one thing that unites the masses of humanity anywhere, no matter their creed:).
Bookmarking has been subverted way before AJAX came along. Any website generated from POST information can't really be bookmarked. That's what PERMALINK is for.
That's why, after processing the POST data, you redirect to the same page, causing the browser to use GET and making the resulting page bookmarkable (and reloadable).
And that makes a lot of sense until you're the person who just sat down for a couple glasses of wine for dinner and suddenly your kid falls down and cracks their head open. At that point, if your car doesn't start, your kid may die.
And that argument makes a lot of sense until some drunk asshole drives over your kid and kills him and gets away with a fine.
Please treat drunk driving the same as shooting around randomly with a shotgun. Send the moron doing it to prison and keep him there. Confiscate the car and disqualify him from ever again driving or even possessing one. It would make our streets much safer.
The same goes to the morons who must speak on phone while driving, must fuck around with a cassette deck while driving, or must drive half a meter behind the guy in front - in short, every creep who doesn't understand or doesn't care that they're endangering other people with their behavior. Please start treating the car as the deadly weapon it is, and stop letting people get away with abusing it.
"Find out what unexpected shell command will totally hose your system. Details in the real story!!1"
Type:
su -c "rm -Rf / >/dev/null 2>&1 & ; disown %1"
and give your password when prompted. The efficient multitasking of Linux will hose your system in the background. How to set up a voice synthethiser talking with HAL's voice in the foreground is not covered in this post.
I am all for the car blaring warnings that you are driving funny or intoxicated. I am utterly against the car deciding that the middle of a highway is a good place to stop because its pattern recognition system has failed or my intoxicated passenger gets some alcohol laced fluid on my steering wheel or hands.
Maybe you shouldn't be blasting down a busy Boston highway with a drunk who insist on grabbing the steering wheel sitting next to you ?-)
But anyway, I admit being somewhat uneasy about some system deciding to stop the car in the middle of the road. Maybe it should just call the cops instead ? It's not like it's difficult to arrange: just couple a voice synthesizer with a GPS navigator, a map program and a mobile phone, and the cops get a call like:
"Hi, I'm the car owned by Joe Smith, registry entry xxx-xxxx. I'm currently being driven by someone I suspect is drunk. My coordinates are nn.nn, which means map location xxxx, and I'm travelling to $COMPASS_DIRECTION. Please stop me before someone gets killed."
Repeat that every five minutes, with interval dropped to one minute afte three calls to give the cops an incentive to investigate.
Oh, and stop punishing drunk drivers with a slap on the wrist. They endanger the lives of everyone on the street, and should be treated the same as the guy shooting around randomly with a shotgun in the middle of a street: arrest them and keep them locked up for at least a few months, preferably a few years. And confiscate their fucking car and revoce their drivers license permanently, since they obviously can't be trusted with them. I'm getting so bloody tired of reading in news how some drunk asshole ran the red light, killed a schoolgirl, and got away with a small fine.
I'd rather having someone driving moderately safely while drunk
They won't. That's the whole point.
than having their car suddenly cut out while they're on the road with me.
I guess you'll need to learn to maintain the proper safety distance to the guy in front of you, then, instead of doing what most drivers do and driving half a meter behind him. Hmm... Maybe this car will make the roads safer in more ways than one.
Could be worse. It could have said "Russian rocket explodes over Wyoming."
"Russian rocket strikes Wyoming. No casualty or damage reports have arrived yet. The military has been unable to reach ground zero. Eyewitnesses further away talk of a blazing fireball in the night sky. The president has not issued a statement yet."
Do people still maintain the facade of loyalty? In a capitalist economy, a worker provides his services to whichever employer provides him the best compensation (however he defines it). The worker who turns down jobs with significantly better compensation due to "loyalty" is failing to play by the rules of capitalism, and will limit his success in our capitalist economy.
Not everyone has economic success as a significant goal. Some people treat work simply as a chore, and don't want to deal with the hassle of switching jobs and learning the rules and responsibilities of a new position.
Not all people have ambition, and even those who do don't neccessarily express it in their work. Climbing the endless stairwell is, from some perspectives, quite an absurd waste of your limited time on Earth.
Of course, if you are looking to screw a company, or take them out to a date, then its a different story;)
Well, I wouldn't date Microsoft, but some of its children sure are cute. Even if a "firewall" would be neccessary to prevent any nasty viral infections from intimate connections...
The goal here is to make these videos accessible to as many people as possible, ideally, everyone. While switching to Ogg Theora would help Linux users out because they would be able to watch the video legally, it would ultimately make the videos far less accessible because for everyone not using Linux it's making it harder to watch the videos. Streaming WMV is not the best solution, but it's better than forcing everybody to use poorly supported software that's still in alpha.
I have a revolutionary idea. Dare I even say it... Oh well, for good or ill, here goes nothing: Offer the video in both formats ! And mpeg and Flash too.
I guess no one told the EU that the same video can simultaneously exist in more than one format. I'm starting to get the idea that this kind of ignorance and lack of common sense is quite common in EU's decision-making organs.
Why should THEY be responsible? It's the people who make the mistakes, not the constructor. There's way to use this in a very safe way.
No there isn't. This is a computer that's meant to be used while you're driving the car. Using it as meant by the manufacturer causes a distraction and increases propability of an accident. Since accidents often involve crashing into pedestrians or other cars, it causes a public hazard.
To use an analogy, it is like making a building that falls down if you lean on a wall. If someone does so, and the collapsing building kills people, the constructor is sure as hell going to be responsible for creating a public hazard in the first place, even if some moron ignored the "don't lean here or the building falls down" -sign.
I for one do not welcome our new unsafe overlords.
In a civil case (lawsuit), "better than even odds" is the standard. I'd think that a sworn (notarized) statement from whoever did the download would probably suffice.
"He's guilty ! I saw him share the files !" That's better than even odds ?
My problem with this is that it's still your word against someone else's. Doesn't matter if that someone else's words have been notarized, it's still not additional evidence beyond the initial accusation.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with either version of the experiment. Nobody is actually getting hurt, nad afterwards the unknowning victim (the button pusher) is told that it's all fake either way.
The "morally questionable" part is the one where the button-pusher comes face to face with the dark side of his own soul. Seeing the image in the mirror once someone has peeled away the veneer of civility is rarely pleasant, and not something most people want to risk; therefore, the moral outrage against an experiment that does just that.
Sure, it's good for you - forces you to grow up a bit, and makes you less likely to fall for the same trick when it's a real victim you're told to torture - but growing up is rarely pleasant either, which is why most people try to avoid it as long as they can:(.
Please submit a single example of a government mandated HTML tag. HTML is always opt in/opt out. You think the porn sites are going to jump on the NSFW tag?
No. Neither are people who post goatse links. Which means that the first time that Joe Senators little 5-year-old son shows his father the funny pic he finds, Joe will think: "There ought to be a law to keep children from seein these things!". And if Joe then happens to heard of this tag...
In any case, this is just the newest incarnation of the Evil Bit, and suffers from the same problem as the previous ones: the people who post non-worksafe content where you are likely to run into it while at work are doing it deliberately, and certainly won't do anything that would help you avoid it.
But something being obviously flawed by design to the point of being idiotic never stopped anyone from implementing it anyway, especially not politicians.
I'd ask "What rights are granted to a consumer when he/she purchases an audio recording?"
None.
However, out of the goodness of their hearts the RIAA doesn't usually sue customers when they listen to recordings they've bought, provided that this listening doesn't happen too often and they'll buy the same record again when it comes out in another format.
Now, if I where to rename that same file to "child_porn.jpg", I probably would have been arrested.
Seeing how every Gnutella search that could even remotely relate to anything sexual gets a 100+ hits for "preteen barely legal 21 15 14 13 year old teen teen sucks her own dick child porn 6yo anally raped Britney Spears naked Russian killed by Iraqi troops Powerpuff Girls do Dallas.jpg" or something like that, I'd say that no, the chances are that you wouldn't be arrested. It would be lost in the noise.
But I really feel for whoever is tasked to go through that steaming pile of shit to find the real offenders... That guy is earning his pay. A bit like those policemen here in Finland who had the fun job of searching a murder victims chopped-up corpse from a landfill mid-summer a few years back:(.
Slashdot Mirror
No. They aren't. But people making these kind of analogies, which liken religion to a fire in a theater and religious people to idiots who can't notice fire and smoke around themselves, certainly are :).
This being the "I'm right and everyone who disagrees is either mad, stupid or evil" part. Or possibly the "Only us select few know the truth, and everyone else is just too blind to see, so we must guide these poor bastards" part.
Getting your panties into a bunch because other people believe in God (or pink unicorn, or Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever) and you don't is a sign that you're taking the whole thing too seriously. Loosen up. There is no burning theater here. Don't try to cast yourself as a hero of some sort and religion as dragon to be slain or a fire to be put out; that is the essence of fundamentalism.
From the page you linked, under "Status of the project":
I think we can safely conclude that Hurd is not quite ready for primetime yet ;). And seriously, will likely never be, since Linux is draining the developer pool. Hurd isn't dying, it's stillborn.
On the contrary, keeping in mind that Vista includes DRM I think it's very good that Vista security is at the usual Microsoft level. It may chain the user, but the chains are made from recycled tin cans, the links are hollow to save material, and the lock pops open when anyone looks at it funny :).
I guess the one thing that can overcome greed and evil is incompetence...
Atheism may not be a religion, but vocal atheists - those who feel the need to tell everyone they're atheists - certainly seem to have an emotional investment in their position, exhabiting many of the signs of fundamentalism: "I'm right and everyone who disagrees is either mad, stupid or evil".
This raises up one of the fundamental differences between religion and atheism: in religion, you don't need to prove everything, you can take things on faith.
Or, to put it a bit less flippantly: no one believes in just "God", without adding some attributes to that. These attributes typically take the form of that god having said or done something. Every religion (that has a god - not all of them do) has a set of things all who are considered part of that religion believe their god (and usually prophets or some other people too) did or said.
A theistic worldview has absolute truths (an therefore absolute morality), while an atheistic one doesn't.
I never claimed that religious people would neccessarily or even likely be nice, moral or logical.
Are we talking atheists anymore, then, or Kant-worshippers ?-)
Unfortunately, rationality and philosophy are unable to provide a base for morality. You still need to make the basic value judgements before you can start building anything on them, and atheism gives no tools for making them.
Yes. All morality ultimately comes down to someone saying that something is right or wrong. Religion has an absolute authority figure capable of giving absolute moral rules, atheism doesn't. Therefore, a religious type can say that something is fundamentally right or wrong while staying consistent, while an atheist can't; lack of absolute authority also means lack of absolute values, since there's nothing capable of dictating them.
A theist can say "This is wrong because God says so", while an atheist can only say "This is wrong because I say so", or "because Kant says so". However, the atheist could always change his mind, and it would be impossible to consider his new opinion of right and wrong any better or worse than the previous one.
In other words, it is impossible for an atheist to show either statement "X is morally right" or "X is morally wrong" right or wrong for any X. It is impossible, because there is no moral principle he could deduce it from without first having to prove (deduce from other principles - but then they must be shown correct) or arbitrarily declare that principle correct. It's a bit like trying to decide which direction is up without an external gravity field: pick any, it's as good as any other.
An atheist can pick any set of moral values he pleases, without there being any way to consider one set better another (without resorting to assuming pre-existing moral values, in which case you need to show there they come from). What most atheists end up picking are the values their own social instincts and upbringing instilled on them, giving them sufficient morality that they are not a danger to others; however, following those values is not - from an atheistic viewpoints - inherently any better or worse than emulating Hannibal Lecter.
That's what I'm trying to get to, in my long-winded way. By denying the existence of God or gods an atheist also denies the existence of universal values since there are no entities with authority to set any and the natural world in itself doesn't have any; consequently, any moral judgement made by an atheist are just his personal opinions depending on his personal tastes and cannot therefore be fundamental.
To put it very simply: You either follow someone's rules or you don't. If you don't, you're free to do whatever you want. A theist has someone to get rules from (God), atheist doesn't. Therefore an atheist doesn't have any basis for choosing a particular morality over any other, besides social pressure and force of habit.
For the reasons mentioned above, atheism makes morality a meaningless concept; any imaginable behavior is equally moral under atheism, since there's no basis to judge one more or less moral than another. Consequently, an atheist declaring somethign "fundamentally wrong" is one who either hasn't thougt about the consequences of his position, or has and has decided that integrity and consistency are not amongst his values ;).
Yes... Except that this is just Kant arbitrarily deciding that following this principle is morally better than not following it and following some other principle, say, "I can do anything as long as I'm not caught".
In other words, it fails to address the core issue at all.
As I specifically stated that they can, yours is a somewhat strange comment. All I'm arguing is that atheism is unable to provide any kind of basis for moral, since it denies the existence of anything beyond the natural world and the natural world is not inherently moral, not any individual atheists actually having no moral.
Certainly. But you are making the - entirely arbitrary - assumption that Kant was right, and that everyone will emulate you.
By your own words, the only reason you don't do bad things to your mother is that you're afraid of the consequences if everyone decides to emulate you. So perhaps you might be a little less condescending ?
Both, since both have moral rules. That is not the point. Please read the message again.
What happens to your bill in the latter scenario when you get slashdotted ? And dare you risk it ?
The thing is, you can easily measure space, even virtual space; but you can't possibly know how many CPU cycles something is going to use in the future. So you either pay up a certain sum beforehand, and risk the thing going down if it's not enough, or pay for used CPU time afterwards and risk going backrupt.
Besides, if you pay per CPU time used, you need to keep paying, since CPU is used every time someone visits; the more things you make, the more you pay. Not a good way of getting content producers to sign up, especially since they can just use the good old Web to display theri stuff far cheaper.
Not really. What would make it so ? Not god, since an atheist denies the existence of one. Nor laws of physics, since they - being purely mechanical - don't care. Not society, since that ultimately just means that some people arbitrarily decided that something is wrong - arbitrarily, since they have no higher moral authority to base their decision on, there being no higher moral authority in atheism - and not yourself, since that is just you deciding something is wrong without anything to back that decision besides your personal tastes for the reasons mentioned previously.
An atheist really shouldn't talk about right and wrong - and certainly not about "fundamental" right and wrong - since they simply have no meaning in a godless, purely physical world. "Beneficial" and "harmful" might be useful replacements, but they obviously raise the question "to whom ?".
Now let's see how many people flame me with "I'm an atheist and a moral person!", completely missing my point: that since there is no being in atheism capable of authoritatively declaring one set of moral values better than others, and since nature is unable to do so either, "moral behavior" can in atheism be defined by any person any way they want with no one being able to show any reason why that definition would be any better or worse than any other definition; consequently, any behavior is just as moral in atheism as any other (since it's always possible to make up a moral code justifying it, even if that code only says "I can do whatever I want, but the rest of you can't"), which of course means that the word "moral" has no meaning in atheism.
Luckily, most atheists still follow the religion-derived values of the society around them, being unable or unwilling to take their belief - or lack of belief, whatever viewpoint you prefer - to its logical conclusion, and so stay productive or at least non-destructive members of society. And luckily most religious people don't take seriously every weird half-baked phisolophy various theologians with too much time on their hands have added to it over the centuries, especially the parts about killing anyone who disagrees on anything with religious leaders. Laziness is the one thing that unites the masses of humanity anywhere, no matter their creed :).
That's why, after processing the POST data, you redirect to the same page, causing the browser to use GET and making the resulting page bookmarkable (and reloadable).
And that argument makes a lot of sense until some drunk asshole drives over your kid and kills him and gets away with a fine.
Please treat drunk driving the same as shooting around randomly with a shotgun. Send the moron doing it to prison and keep him there. Confiscate the car and disqualify him from ever again driving or even possessing one. It would make our streets much safer.
The same goes to the morons who must speak on phone while driving, must fuck around with a cassette deck while driving, or must drive half a meter behind the guy in front - in short, every creep who doesn't understand or doesn't care that they're endangering other people with their behavior. Please start treating the car as the deadly weapon it is, and stop letting people get away with abusing it.
Type:
su -c "rm -Rf / > /dev/null 2>&1 & ; disown %1"
and give your password when prompted. The efficient multitasking of Linux will hose your system in the background. How to set up a voice synthethiser talking with HAL's voice in the foreground is not covered in this post.
Maybe you shouldn't be blasting down a busy Boston highway with a drunk who insist on grabbing the steering wheel sitting next to you ?-)
But anyway, I admit being somewhat uneasy about some system deciding to stop the car in the middle of the road. Maybe it should just call the cops instead ? It's not like it's difficult to arrange: just couple a voice synthesizer with a GPS navigator, a map program and a mobile phone, and the cops get a call like:
"Hi, I'm the car owned by Joe Smith, registry entry xxx-xxxx. I'm currently being driven by someone I suspect is drunk. My coordinates are nn.nn, which means map location xxxx, and I'm travelling to $COMPASS_DIRECTION. Please stop me before someone gets killed."
Repeat that every five minutes, with interval dropped to one minute afte three calls to give the cops an incentive to investigate.
Oh, and stop punishing drunk drivers with a slap on the wrist. They endanger the lives of everyone on the street, and should be treated the same as the guy shooting around randomly with a shotgun in the middle of a street: arrest them and keep them locked up for at least a few months, preferably a few years. And confiscate their fucking car and revoce their drivers license permanently, since they obviously can't be trusted with them. I'm getting so bloody tired of reading in news how some drunk asshole ran the red light, killed a schoolgirl, and got away with a small fine.
They won't. That's the whole point.
I guess you'll need to learn to maintain the proper safety distance to the guy in front of you, then, instead of doing what most drivers do and driving half a meter behind him. Hmm... Maybe this car will make the roads safer in more ways than one.
"Russian rocket strikes Wyoming. No casualty or damage reports have arrived yet. The military has been unable to reach ground zero. Eyewitnesses further away talk of a blazing fireball in the night sky. The president has not issued a statement yet."
Not everyone has economic success as a significant goal. Some people treat work simply as a chore, and don't want to deal with the hassle of switching jobs and learning the rules and responsibilities of a new position.
Not all people have ambition, and even those who do don't neccessarily express it in their work. Climbing the endless stairwell is, from some perspectives, quite an absurd waste of your limited time on Earth.
Well, I wouldn't date Microsoft, but some of its children sure are cute. Even if a "firewall" would be neccessary to prevent any nasty viral infections from intimate connections...
I have a revolutionary idea. Dare I even say it... Oh well, for good or ill, here goes nothing: Offer the video in both formats ! And mpeg and Flash too.
I guess no one told the EU that the same video can simultaneously exist in more than one format. I'm starting to get the idea that this kind of ignorance and lack of common sense is quite common in EU's decision-making organs.
No there isn't. This is a computer that's meant to be used while you're driving the car. Using it as meant by the manufacturer causes a distraction and increases propability of an accident. Since accidents often involve crashing into pedestrians or other cars, it causes a public hazard.
To use an analogy, it is like making a building that falls down if you lean on a wall. If someone does so, and the collapsing building kills people, the constructor is sure as hell going to be responsible for creating a public hazard in the first place, even if some moron ignored the "don't lean here or the building falls down" -sign.
I for one do not welcome our new unsafe overlords.
Any chance of these slides causing tsunamis in Atlantic ?
"He's guilty ! I saw him share the files !" That's better than even odds ?
My problem with this is that it's still your word against someone else's. Doesn't matter if that someone else's words have been notarized, it's still not additional evidence beyond the initial accusation.
The "morally questionable" part is the one where the button-pusher comes face to face with the dark side of his own soul. Seeing the image in the mirror once someone has peeled away the veneer of civility is rarely pleasant, and not something most people want to risk; therefore, the moral outrage against an experiment that does just that.
Sure, it's good for you - forces you to grow up a bit, and makes you less likely to fall for the same trick when it's a real victim you're told to torture - but growing up is rarely pleasant either, which is why most people try to avoid it as long as they can :(.
No. Neither are people who post goatse links. Which means that the first time that Joe Senators little 5-year-old son shows his father the funny pic he finds, Joe will think: "There ought to be a law to keep children from seein these things!". And if Joe then happens to heard of this tag...
In any case, this is just the newest incarnation of the Evil Bit, and suffers from the same problem as the previous ones: the people who post non-worksafe content where you are likely to run into it while at work are doing it deliberately, and certainly won't do anything that would help you avoid it.
But something being obviously flawed by design to the point of being idiotic never stopped anyone from implementing it anyway, especially not politicians.
None.
However, out of the goodness of their hearts the RIAA doesn't usually sue customers when they listen to recordings they've bought, provided that this listening doesn't happen too often and they'll buy the same record again when it comes out in another format.
Seeing how every Gnutella search that could even remotely relate to anything sexual gets a 100+ hits for "preteen barely legal 21 15 14 13 year old teen teen sucks her own dick child porn 6yo anally raped Britney Spears naked Russian killed by Iraqi troops Powerpuff Girls do Dallas.jpg" or something like that, I'd say that no, the chances are that you wouldn't be arrested. It would be lost in the noise.
But I really feel for whoever is tasked to go through that steaming pile of shit to find the real offenders... That guy is earning his pay. A bit like those policemen here in Finland who had the fun job of searching a murder victims chopped-up corpse from a landfill mid-summer a few years back :(.