... you can't opt out of feedback loops and selection mechanisms any more than you can opt out of thermodynamics or probability.
Perhaps. I'd even go as far as probably. But natural selection is defined in a very narrow scope (it's an intrinsic property of science to try to not overstate something when there's yet to be evidence to go along with it). So, I think it is more a matter of definition on what is included in natural selection. There is something like natural selection that exists and it applies in both the biological and the economical. But, the two aren't entirely the same. While the former strives to match the data, the latter tends to be based a little bit more on faith, working on a model that's known to fail (monopolies, a lack of perfect information, etc) to entirely explain what will happen.
It is for that reason that I, personally, am not so willing to dismiss the possibility that there is something beyond natural selection as a model that does work even if it doesn't "naturally" exist--naturally in the same way that while gasoline can burn and metals can be molded, you don't see internal combustion engines sprouting from the ground.
Selection is a feedback mechanism. A feedback mechanism may lead to a collapse, or not, depending on the circumstances.
Ie, selection is chaotic/not predictable enough and dangerous to the survival of the human species.
Claiming that a feedback mechanism should be either accepted or fought against because under some circumstances it can lead to a collapse, when it is not clear to me how one would endeavor to do such a thing in the first place, is foolish.
I'm not sure if you're making two points or one point in this. If this were not a feedback mechanism but something else, and it was not clear how to accept/fight that something else, would you still say it is foolish to endeavor to make such plans? I ask because people have been dreamers for quite some time, making plans to either go with the accepted or fight against it. And, without those dreamers, we wouldn't have things like...well...almost everything technology wise (things that aren't the result of having accepting the status quo or rejecting it are reasonably rare) and probably in every field.
Now, if your argument was "well, we shouldn't fight against X because every alternative to X could be worse", I'd only point out that at least in the specific case, X seems like a very doomsday scenario already. Sure, there could still be circmstances worse caused by an alternative to X, and it's not like I was advocating simply taking any alternative up blindly. Afterall, I did say:
But, then, just saying "don't do X" doesn't really tell one what *should* be done.
No, the conclusion merely advocates that since we know that X has identifyable problems, we should be keenly interested in searching for alternatives to X. It doesn't mean we should blindly abandon X today. It *does* mean we shouldn't blindly follow X under the presumption that it's the best system; we have good evidence that it is a system with several, probably catostrophic, flaws.
Having said all that, my main point wasn't to directly advocate the modified quote. It was mainly to make it a more valid conclusion (probably imperfect, but most conclusions include some bias) instead of a logical fallacy.
Really, I'm not sure *what* your point is, now. At first it sounded like you were mocking those who did the study because they drew a conclusion that was obvious to you (which is invariably the result of what happens when a study meets expected predictions). But, now it sounds like you're arguing that their conclusion is actually counter to what was shown in the study (which wouldn't be so much a "new revelation" to complain about but a simple "logical fallacy" to complain about).
And looking back over the quote (which I really hadn't thought about until now, since the quote hadn't seemed to be the real crux of the study or your complaint), I'd say it's a logical fallacy. Polynesians experienced natural selection. They didn't fight against it. It is natural selection (and market forces) that produce unsustainable situations which eventually lead to ecological/economic disaster. If anything, the point should be raised that one should be fighting *against* natural selection/market forces to counter this. But, then, just saying "don't do X" doesn't really tell one what *should* be done.
But, please do clarify what you meant, since I'm still not entirely sure how to take what you've said.
The study itself is an interesting confirmation...
Gosh. Who would imagine that a part of science would be to confirm existing theories?
But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation...
Well, it is. No one else had done such a study up to this point. Just because the revelation is "it's exactly what we expected" doesn't mean it wasn't a revelation. Up until the study was actually done, anyone who claimed to "know" what the result would be would invariably be speculating. Now, one could argue about the degree of uncertainty. But, every time another one of these studies are done instead of merely assuming the answer is know, the better capable of reducing the future uncertainty when speculation is invariably done.
But, yea, let's insult the nice scientists because they do studies to confirm things instead of boiling everything down to a system of unchanging beliefs. How's that working out for you?
Well, let's see. On the one hand, Microsoft is reporting recording earnings (IIRC) due in large part to Vista sales. On the other hand, they're trying to boost sales with a gimmicky prize/quiz thing. Sure, it's something that "happens in every business". But, not every business is a convincted monopolist with a basically guaranteed lock on the sale of their product (at some point, they can just raise the price of XP to push OEMs to go with Vista; IIRC, they did something similar in the past because, not surprisingly, a lot of people don't want to try out "the new cutting edge OS"--they want to use what they're familiar with and what all their local neighborhood geeks have years of experience dealing with).
So, is it really newsworthy? I guess not. But, at least when in the future people talk about how "great Vista sales were" and "how unworried MS was", there's potentially a/. article (and more importantly, the knowledge of the existance of the contest) to at least point out that MS wasn't so comfortable as to do away with "a common business tactic". Or, perhaps people should rely less on news reports (which are inherently bias towards reporting what's new and what's unexpected) and more on the collective samplings of the rantings of the thousands of people who write blogs and other journals. But, then, that's not something you can trivially cite to prove a point about the state of the world at some time in the past. *shrugs*
The White House has contended that the e-mail requested by the group has been lost.
What Clinton Did:
August 23, 2000 (from GP's link)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Clinton administration official who oversees the troubled White House e-mail system testified Wednesday he never told President Clinton about the computer problem that prevented thousands of White House e-mails from being properly stored and archived.
I see, so it sounds like Clinton and Bush did more or less precisely the same thing (although the former is too vague to be exactly sure).
Also, it was not about Clinton getting his bishop buffed in the Oval Office. It was about the Clinton's ordering the FBI to hand over the files of political enemies. From same article
Wow, you know, you've just went amazingly off-topic. Why, gosh, it's a good thing you didn't just ask someone else to stay on-topic. Otherwise, you'd look like a hypocrite.
So, even if Bush is as bad as you say he is, he's doing it to protect the country. The Clintons did what they did to blackmail political enemies using the FBI as their hired thugs.
Right, so when Bush loses emails, it's to protect the country. When Clinton loses emails, it's part of a blackmailing politicial enemy scheme. Or, wait, is that part of your off-topic analysis? Because if you really want to go off-topic, then you'd better go back to refute the original points made about what Bush has done to draw a comparison. Otherwise, you sound like as much of a hack as the person you're critiquing.
as he said the Eighth Amendment bar against "cruel and unusual punishment" was only intended to apply to criminal punishments:
No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..
If you're torturing someone for evidence in a trial....
... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
... and if it's not as a means to collect evidence for a trial, then clearly due process of law is not being followed, which means you can't torture the person* (ie, deprive them of life) or detain the person (ie, dperive them of liberty). Or, simple put, torture is prohibited by the 5th Amendment.
I always love it how those who wish to do narrow the rights of others so gravity towards focusing on a narrow interpretation of one Amendment or clause, completely disregarding how another smacks in the face of their analysis.
*Note: This isn't mean to say that you could legalize torture, just that this clause alone doesn't stipulate the absolute illegality of torutre.
We've already tried incarcerating them. The prisons are overcrowded. It costs about ~$45,000 a year to incarcerate one person in prison. So are you saying that we should be wasting our money guarding ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS because they've committed crimes here in America?
Are "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS" pariahs? Are we "wasting our money" guarding any *other* criminal? The argument that our prisons are "overcrowded" is bullshit, quite frankly. We have chosen to not raise taxes to pay for more prisons because people have come to the mentality that criminals are unworthy of the money spent on them. Yet, the whole point of spending money on prisons is to avoid the problem we're having right now, of allowing criminals to not be punished appropriately resulting in society becoming a prison yard, all possible restricts applying.
Is a safe border really a waste of money? Do you consider the locks on your front door to be a waste of money?
That is a false analogy. The whole of the US is not the US government's private property. The government's job is not to prevent people from entering and exiting the country. It *is* their job to help assimilate people who enter the country, by providing them the means to become citizens (however dubious it is to allow a government to deny those who live in a country citizenship).
The waste of money is Iraq. The waste of money is the war on drugs.
These being wasted doesn't make it a waste to secure the border. Nor was it being called a waste as a means to state that such should be the first thing considered to reduce the budget. Yet, it does remain a waste.
Having a secure border isn't a waste of money... it is intrinsic to having a stable society.
Sorry to break it to you, but we're not supposed to live in a stable society. A democracy is, by definition, all about the whim of the populace. In 50 years, we've went through communist scares, hippies, an explosion in drug use, the ultra-conservative religious right, and a "war on terror". With the rest of the world (ie, the other 80% or so) finally getting to the point where they might switch from developing to developed, the United States place in the world is almost certainly going to be radically altered. The isolationism of trying to exclude people to go in (or really, out) of the country is merely an attempt to slow down the globalization effect of having many developed societies where there is more worldwide consistentcy (if not stability) in society.
Or to look at it another way, you have a choice. Either you get one world government without any borders, or you get nation states with borders. Which one do you want?
I don't think there's much of a choice in the matter, really. In the long term, democracies will flurish and treaties will bind many governments actions as one (look at the EU, for example). The United States kicking and biting to remain isolated is a move that will likely create a short-term depression and pain. Personally, I'd rather not go down that road. Just like I'd rather wish we hadn't gone down the road of heavy oil dependency after we saw the flaws of that in the 70s.
I don't see people getting up in arms because the laws and the police are preventing your neighbors from walking into your living room whenever they feel like it. Yet people get bent out of shape whenever the issue of securing the border comes up. It doesn't make any sense.
"Your" country isn't your private property. "Your" country is a democratic republic, where long ago it was recognized that trying to suppress every "neighbor" you don't like results in a tyranny of the masses (which can still occur, of course, if enough masses decide to alter their republic fundamentally). Why are you obsessed with the fact that your new neighbor came from Mexico instead of Oregon? Is i
One of the big problems that the police are encountering when dealing with the gang is that when they arrest the guys here in America, they deport them. Once deported they join the gang in Central America. When they get into trouble in Central America they flee back to the United States. If we had stronger controls over who comes in and out of the country, we'd have an easier time tracking criminals who jump back and forth across the border.
So, we arrest gang members who *could* be convicted of a crime, deport them, wait for them to come back, and this time we're going to do what? Deport them again? Yea, I *so* like this plan of increasing border security. It'd be much too simple to just incarcerate those who commit crimes. Let's instead waste our money and time trying to guard thousands of miles of border while trying to keep the "bad people" out. Oh, and let's harrass everyone who does try to enter "legally" with degrading treatment (including searching their things) and even *more* invasive techniques to verify the person is who they claim they are. Because, you know, it's not a human right or anything for the free exercise of movement/travel.
Product information -including price- is most likely manually entered into their database. Why do you think Amazon should swallow thousands of dollars worth of losses over a typo?
It's funny you say that because such is probably inevitable. Imagine if, instead of pricing the product at $30, they had accidentally priced it at $4990. How many people would have simply thought Amazon was overly priced and either (a) spent their money elsewhere or (b) spent it on another good on the site, requiring Amazon to, once it realizes the mistake, undersell the CD collection (swallowing potentially thousands of dollars) to move inventory? Really, for something so vitally import, there really should be safeguards/procedures to avoid typos because there's more than one way for a typo to result in thousands of dollars worth of losses. Besides, isn't it economics who are so keen to see monetary punishment used as a means to inspire change in the deficits of the market?
I think you're missing his point. He isn't arguing against server side webapps. He's arguing against client side webapps. The former can do things like access databases (validating input and isolating the actual database) while the latter doesn't really improve on that situation (you can't trust a client to give valid input and if you did, you'd effectively removed a lot of isolation). Sure, there are a lot of people who would prefer a lot of the niceties that comes with javascript (a more malleable interface and sanity validating come to mind), but the GGP just doesn't feel that those extras are worth the security risk and so javascript shouldn't be a necessary step in functionality. I can't really say I disagree with him, if for no other reason that javascript doesn't necessarily exist everywhere, so a website that wants to be most accessible would have to make a non-javascript version anyways.
I've always felt that one should be able to say or write anything that suits their fancy. Short of something that could put someone in immediate harm (i.e. shouting, "Fire!" in a crowded place).
Ever since I've spent the time to actually think about "shouting fire in a crowded theater", I've come to realize that, if anything, such is probably the best example of something that *should* be protected speech. As a major point, crowds aren't inherently more stupid/dangerous than individuals. The only thing that grants them any sort of ability to act as such is the inability to establish individual actors in close quarters and that being realized translating into individuals being willing to do acts which they would not normally do alone (eg. trampling people). In fact, it is precise the work of trying to identify faces in a crowd that is seen as so draconian by governments, because people join crowds so they aren't personally required to support an idea.
But, that idea works in all ways. It is the reason why standing armies are so counter to a stable democracy and why private organizations in which people are willing to be supportive, possibly to the death, are so imperative. Now, this can obviously fracture into factions that fight for power and attempts might be made to use nationalism as a glue to keep people at peace (which is bad because that translates into standing armies). But, in the end, the real way to keep the peace is let people know that they are held accountable for their own actions, without the ability to use an organization as a shield (which is not to say an organization can't be a shield, but it is through the action of a collection of individuals that a shield is established, not the mere presence of those individuals). So, in the end, to punish the person who yells "Fire" instead of the people who mindlessly respond only supports the idea that the mob is able to do whatever acts it pleases so long as it can use a socially-accepted scapegoat. But, without a scapegoat, the crowd and the individuals would have to be held accountable. That is the real and more effective justice that should happen.
He is also very weak on Iraq and national defense, which is scary because national defense is about the only thing our Government should do.
Out of curiosity, why did you group "Iraq and national defense" like that? Last I checked, Iraq wasn't banging at our doorstep in even a remotely indirect way. Further, last I heard, Ron Paul wasn't against "national defense", he was against excessive "national offense" (aka, going into other countries and behaving as world police). It's hard to believe that the US has any legitimate reason to be spending over 30% (40%? 50%? The numbers aren't entirely clear, especially considering standard of living wages.) of the world budget on military expenditures under a need for national "defense". No, the US has put it upon itself to be a "superpower" and to outspend every other country so that the world is under its thumb. That's *not* what the US Government is supposed to be doing.
More importantly, not that every dollar Microsoft pulls in is taxed _multiple_ times by the time it makes it into the shareholders' pockets.
Um, every dollar *anyone* takes in is taxed multiple times. The complaint is, you can either tax a very low rate on everyone (thereby quintuple dipping, as money cycles through) or you can push the tax rate much higher and push it on a subset of the potential tax payers (and try to only dip once). However, there's no way to avoid dipping multiple times (consumers buy, which goes to companies, which pay employees/shareholders (aka consumers), which as consumers buy,...). And adding in exceptions only works to hide the tax costs of companies (if a company moves in and refuses to pay taxes, they'll just have to up the tax rate on all other tax payers to compensate (assuming they do and don't just run the government financially into the ground)). Beyond that, exceptions only further entangle the tax code, making it much harder to determine how costs are being hid and if the result of hiding has effectively reduced the amount paid by people in smaller loops.
Is there any truly fair tax system? Probably not. But, cries of being taxed multiple times is hardly the sort of thing that makes me hold pity on only *one* part of the tax paying base.
May I ask...who cares if Microsoft is not an innovator?
Investors who realize that if Microsoft is always forced to buy-out the latest technology, they will eventually implode as they try to graft together hundreds of questionably compatable technology to maintain their monopoly.
In your example, Microsoft recognized a technology that, per your admittance, is excellent. So instead of them developing their own networking system for Windows, they realized that incoporating an already developed and tested system is far better for them and their users.
You conveniently skipped over option b, buying out a technology just to shelve it. There's also the point that option a usually comes with strings attached, specificially that Microsoft tends to Microsoftize anything they decide to buy-out and release as made by Microsoft. This leads to the following:
Everyone purchases other companies or licenses technologies from them. Guess what? OS X? Built off BSD and NextOS. Safari? Built off webkit. Google purchased Picasa, Sketchup and Earth Viewer (ie Google Earth).
Webkit is an improvement off of KHTML. I can't say whether Google Earth, etc are improvements. I can't say OS X was really an improvement over BSD/NextOS technologies.
This 'endless cycle' you speak off is not limited to Microsoft.
Very true. And a lot of the time, companies who buy out other companies and incorporate their technology either (a) simply rebrand the product without touching it otherwise or (b) radical altere it in a way that cripples the original use and/or misuses the clear potential of the product. Microsoft is certainly not the only company that buys out other companies/products. Microsoft just happens to do it a lot more than other companies and often does it more visibly than other companies. And that translates into, by raw numbers, Microsoft being near the top (if not the top) offender* of destroying the innovation of other companies.
*Yea, obviously, all the private companies and the private investors that sell out are just as guilty. But, again, we're talking raw numbers, not percentages.
God may or may not be knowable. He may or may not affect our reality. That which is unobservable may exist; it is just not provable. Something unknowable and unable to affect our reality is irrelevant; it still can exist.
Your self-righteous indignation against Christians, Muslims, etc doesn't provide an answer to potentially unanswerable questions. You can deny certain gods because they are required to have observable effects. You can deny certain gods because they are irrelevant. You can deny certain gods because they are amoral. But, none of that provides the certainty to know if a god does or not exist.
For whatever reason, I actually LIKE the whole 'cancel/allow' mechanism that is UAC. I like getting buzzed when someone like Adobe Acrobat Reader decides that they own my system and just sets about installing crap.
I can understand this. My experience with ZoneAlarm was similar, where I felt like I had more control over the situation than I had in the past. But, in the end, it is better to trust that the programs that you run won't "install crap". And if you really want, those that do "install crap" can be modified to not "install crap". Anything less, and you're still praying that an adverserial program doesn't figure out a way to do an end-run around you.
I like getting alerted with a little dialog box saying 'are you sure you want to do this' when mucking about with system settings.
I liked this with Linux for a while, too. It felt great knowing that I was the one in control, not some program. But, in the end, I didn't want to be in control. Me being in control just meant that it was me who was responsible when something broke, even when I reasonably couldn't have known that my actions would break things. Instead of providing the means to undo potentially damaging actions, I was just given more rope to hang myself. Sure, the scary dialog box might stop or slow me down from changing "system settings". But, then, I have to wonder why, at times, I'm not given the flexability to expose some of the "safer" functions to a lower authority user account instead of having to take a leap of faith and give something full authority.
I have all kinds of network activity and computer monitoring gadgets in the Windows Sidebar.
Those were neat in Linux, too. But why was I so obsessed with network activity and monitoring gadgets? Because I was so upset and afraid when one errant program would take up all of one system resource, causing my whole system to work so sluggishly the second another program wanted the tiniest slice of that resource for its own usage. I'd rather I didn't have to worry so much about such bottlenecks instead of having to glamarize the mundane monitoring tools just to keep my system working well.
The whole Media Center thing is quite handy for watching TV and listening to music, which I store on one PC and can stream from every other PC, transparently, through the media player interface.
Now, this is one of the few things I can get behind (although I do have complaints about having to encode/record video at set times instead of having on-demand access, but that's not something an OS can fix (or likely even a big company like MS)) rather fully. VCRs and Tivos sound great, but they're separate and disjoint, which only makes yet another separate thing that one has to hunt down and manage. It's much nicer to simplify things into a joint set to manage, and MS's file manager is rather decent at that.
Finally, Vista Home Premium came with IIS7, which is turning out to be quite handy and easy to use for my 'hobby' website.
I can't really comment on this, really. I'm just as afraid to use IIS as Apache, given that a misconfiguration could leave oneself open to attack. But, I hope that works out well for you.
I have 4 computers in my home. 2 came with Vista. All 4 have legal Vista installs at this point.
beings outside the observable universe would know things we cannot
Go back and read what I wrote again. There is no domain outside of reality.
Um, you're missing my point. The point was is that, there are things that are definitely inside the scope of reality (black holes) and there are things that very probably are within the scope of reality (universe beyond the observable universe) that are unobservable/unknowable to humans. The realm of reality is not equivalent to what is knowable by humans.
Anything 'outside' the universe would just be... part of the universe. Therefore, nothing unreal exists; in other words, anything that is real is part of reality.
Now you're either equivocating (by stating nothing unreal exist, where unreal happens to be defined as everything you consider preposterous) or stating a blatantly irrelevant tautology (that if you include everything that's part of reality in reality, there's nothing of reality in the inverse set of reality, but since the existance of God or not is unknown, nothing has been usefully said about the existance of God in the set of reality).
Could anything exist outside of reality? Who cares?
You, apparently, since you seem to be trying to create sets of the unreal. Personally, my discussion was about things that may or may not be part of reality and how observable they are.
Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unknowable and inable to have any affect upon reality, and therefore is of no signficance to us anyway.
A small point. We don't know *where* the lines of reality are. We can make tons of observations, try to be as consistent and mythodical as possible, and come up with amazing theories that can explain all that we've observed so far. But, they're all based upon such axioms as the universe doesn't fundamentally change over time or, if it does, it does so in a measureable way; universe laws are consistent across its entirity, or at least, any irregularities of universal laws are measureable and predictable; any interaction between our three dimensions of space and one of time are bidirectional with or through any higher dimensions that may exist, ie if our three dimensions of space and one of time intersect with another three dimensions of space and one of time, interactions will go both way in a profoundly measurable and predicable way; further, if there exists higher dimensional beings capable of interacting with the one or many 3 space, 1 times, those interactions are predictable and measureable enough to account for; and probably a whole host of other possibles that could possible compose reality.
Now, do I disbelieve any of the above things I posted in the above paragraph? Not particularly. But, I am very consciously aware that I have made a choice to choose a position on such subjects when there simply isn't enough evidence to be even scientificly confident about certain aspects of reality, at least as of yet. Having said that, I realize that probably a lot of the above paragraph is irrelevant in any case.
This seems to be a very difficult concept for some religious people to understand.
Just a small FYI, but I'm agnostic (overall). I'd claim myself as an athiest if it were feasible, but it's not (just to clarify, I'm athiest about the Christian God, but I'm not athiest about some god-like power, since a higher-dimensional being could exist and would be percieved to have god-like (by definition) powers of interaction; but, just because a god-like power could exist doesn't mean it does exist or has ever interacted with our three space, one time dimensional realm).
See Daniel Dennett for a more thorough attempt to explain this concept.
All religions, including Islam, make explicit claims about reality.
True.
Reality is "the Seen." That's all reality is, and all it could possibly be.
Um, no. Reality is what is. The perception of reality is separate from reality itself. To give two clearly known examples, consider the inside of a black hole and the Heisenburg uncertainly principle. In the former, black holes do exist (as far as we know), hence qualify as reality. But, there's no way to look inside a black hole. In the latter, the exact location and momentum of a particle might not be knowable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a particle doesn't have an exact location (well, a series of highly probable locations, including the sum locations of its waveform) and an exact momentum. There are clearly known to be things in science that are unseeable.
That's all human beings are - by definition - capable of knowing. There is no domain outside of reality.
Um, you're mixing up two points to try to level a stronger case than you can make. As I've already shown, there are things in reality that humans know they can't know. Now, the specific examples I've given are things that, as far as is known by science, no being could know. But, it's not hard to imagine that there could exist things that humans can't know but other beings could (for example, any beings outside the observable universe would know things we cannot). Now, is this provable? Is it science? No. But the most reasonable standpoint isn't to make statements of certainty that, by definition, one can't know about.
And that's what connects back to your statement. Sure, religion is the same boat. It talks about things that are defined as unobservable by humans but do not provide the agency to explain how information transfer could occur. So, sure, it's unreasonable to believe that the Bible or the Quran prove anything about the unseen. It is reasonable to use things offered as seeable proof to disprove the Bible or the Quran. But, that only disproves the Bible or the Quran. It doesn't disprove the unseeable.
And just to drive the point home, let me give you an example. If I flip a coin and someone else, without seeing the coin, makes a statement of fact that the coin is heads, disproving that they couldn't know the answer doesn't magically force the coin to be tails. It only disproves their ability to make accurate assertions about the state of the coin.
I don't think Safe Harbor should apply to YouTube, for example. YouTube does not receive a flat fee from the content producers, instead making its money on click-through ads. This means that YouTube's profit is intrinsically linked to the popularity of its content (and, incidentally, the most popular material often infringes copyright).
And if the magazines a printer prints are more or less popular has no effect on the revenue stream of the printer?
To my mind, this makes YouTube a publisher, not a printer, hence a valid target for law suits.
They're both, but they're given the same sort of protection that common carriers are. And in return, they have to follow certain procedures to maintain neutrality.
They have chosen not to employ editors. Would a newspaper company be able to publish an edition without an editor and disavow all responsibility for the content? I think not! Why should YouTube get different treatment?
Because YouTube isn't a newspaper, just like the phone company or/. isn't a newspaper. The conscious choice to abdicate oneself from editorial control is precisely because (a) it holds the poster responsible for their own post, (b) it allows less bias to be expressed by editors, and (c) it allows for a much larger volume of content to be passed through the phone company/YouTube than would be realistically possible if everything had to get a "seal of approval". Now, does this mean YouTube or the phone company gets to act with no regard to the people/the government? No. It means that they're afforded some liability protection in exchange for things like (a) promptly removing alledged infringing material, (b) being prevented from going out and censoring content that they disapprove of, and (c) not being allowed to advertise their service precisely for its unlawful uses.
SeeqPod is different. SeeqPod is a music search engine, and the only music people search for is illegal stuff. Sure, you may be able to search for legal stuff, but who would bother? Legal MP3s just aren't redistributed much -- if you want them, you go to the band's homepage and download them, and you don't need a music search engine for that.
Um, because it's quicker/easier to search by a song name than to first search for a band name, then navigate a site?
Btw, it's great to know you've done a survey to find out that "legal MP3s just aren't redistributed much". Are you also for tapping and filtering phone lines because "legal [phone usage] just [doesn't happen] much"? I mean, I really love your approach to fixing criminal problems. Don't hold the people accountable who are commiting the actual crime. Instead, go after the people who "faciliate" the crime. Btw, since there's a gas tax to faciliate road repair, does that mean every single high speed chase, speeding ticket, etc means the government can be charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting? I mean, they sure have an interest in seeing people using their gas less efficiently, resulting in larger gas tax revenue.
PS - I don't search for illegal music. But, then, I rather like game music and there's lots of nice people who post content to ocremix.org. Of course, I presume that there's more than ocremix.org out there for such content. But, you know, I guess I can't be allowed to search for it because of all the people who would dare to do something illegal.
Well Beethoven was able to write music only because...
Um, no. Beethoven was able to write music because he was a damn good musician. Further, Beethoven wrote music because he wanted to. If deafness could not stop Beethoven, I very much doubt a lack of patrons would have stopped him. Now, would Beethoven be as well known with him writing the music and hearing it in his head but without a piano to play it or a captive audience to listen? Very probably not. But, that's a rather different issue.
Far from being "A Microsoft extension to HTML" as some people are describing it, this is an attempt to retain backwards compatibility while fixing Internet Explorer to more closely follow the specifications. It does this using the standard HTML way of incorporating additional metadata.
Out of curiosity, what would this "additional metadata" be? The general complaint, as I understand it, is pretty simple: instead of supporting specification X properly, Microsoft is supporting specification X' when it sees data in specification X format, with the ability to render specification X properly if you throw in some extra metadata. Now, this is entirely *backwards* to how you follow the specification. If Microsoft wanted to, say, support specification X and add metadata to support their own custom, non-standard X', that'd be up to them, and I don't think people would be upset. But, at the point that Microsoft demands that you add in extra metadata *outside the specification* just so that a document will render properly, Microsoft has effectively redefined the specification. That, around these parts, is known as "embrace and extend". It also smacks of them being able to really claim they, for example, can pass the Acid2 test.
If you have a better idea of how they can satisfy the constraints of backwards compatibility and closer conformance to the specifications, please, describe it. As far as I can see, this is the best way of doing it.
And if you have a better idea on how to end the use of illegal drugs in the US... Have you ever considered that when people complain about the War on Drugs or Microsoft's lack of standards compliance that there's a reason? Have you ever considered that you can't simply redefine the situation--built-in with a set of assumptions of what must happen--to ignore the valid complaints that wish to evoke change away from what is happening?
Sure, it's their own fault they are in this mess, but bitching about their past behaviour doesn't mean that this attempt to fix things is the wrong approach.
It is the wrong approach. The *right* approach is working to be standards compliant, backwards compatibility possibly be damned. And if Microsoft fucks up again (not that I'd blame them, since it's really hard to be standards complaint as standards are almost always ambiguous), they can break compatibility again moving from IE8 to IE9. The end goal is to move as many people to writing standards complaint pages as soon as possible. If people really want to, they can continue to run IE7 or IE6 (although MS sure can try to fight it) to view older data. The longer that non-standard compliant browsers exist, the longer *new* data is written out of compliance and that only further delays having a platform-independent information medium.
As a consumer, I would be upset if the service I paid for did not work. In this case, MS is offering a form of compensation.
More, they're trying to bribe people to continue to use their service, since one's service being incredibly flakey to new users is a horrible first impression.
Is this form of compensation adequate for all users? I would say probably not. I'm sure many would prefer a refund.
Right, but then a refund would be actual compensation.
Well, how much is MS required to refund to all users? Do they just give everyone $5 back? In my opinion, extending each users subscription by a month would be a more equitable compensation than an arcade game that many may not even want.
Assuming that next month's service actually works and there's no extenuating circumstances, you're probably right.
Still, I'm not sure MS is legally bound to provide any compensation for these issues, but they have. To file a class-action lawsuit is a bit over the top though, and I doubt it will go anywhere.
It's funny. You seem to be arguing that MS may or may not be legally bound to provide compensation for failing to provide services paid for, yet you think asking a court to decide in a class-action lawsuit (ie, one lawsuit on behalf of all users to simplify the ruling/situation) is "over the top". How *else* do you suppose that people be assured the knowledge and backing to obtain adequate and correct (as legally determined) compensation? Wishful thinking?
WRONG There is an implied license in the sale of a copyrighted work, which unless stated otherwise only gives you the right to read the book or run the software.
There is no "implied license" to read a book or run software. There is the innate property that possession of a copyrighted work allows one to read, run, etc that work. Further, copying is only nationally restricted under copyright law, for which fair use and/or existing statues within copyright (such as specifically allowing copying if it's necessary to use software, can reasonably be said to void any need for the copyright holder's approval in copying to use software. Further, perhaps you've not heard the story of First Sale Doctrine. Specificially:
In that case, the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, had inserted a notice in its books that any retail sale at a price under $1.00 would constitute an infringement of its copyright. The defendants, who owned Macys department store, disregarded the notice and sold the books at a lower price without Bobbs-Merrills consent. We held that the exclusive statutory right to "vend" applied only to the first sale of the copyrighted work... -- Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908)
Ie, EULAs don't magically stick to software (or books) and magically override statutory rights. Offering "a way out" doesn't work any more than it'd be legal to try to force a contract to override legal statute; imagine the absurdity, for example, of trying to claim it were legal to offer a car which included an EULA that stipulated that the car manufacturer could commit identity theft on the owner without any resolution, but the owner could return the car to opt out of the EULA. Why would you think an EULA, even if agreed to, could remove or override in any way explicit statutory rights?
I think it goes without saying that it's difficult to become a seasoned, experienced suicide bomber.
Yes and no (I'll get to this later, since it's sort of a side issue). The main problem is, any selective screening process is inherently inferior to random sampling in the long term. If you have a genuinely determined foe, they won't send merely one suicide bomber; they will send thousands. And of those thousands, some will get through. With a selective screening process, it is possible for your foe to eventually determine what traits for their suicide bombers to not have; then they can train/select such individuals. With random sampling, there is no way to game the system.
Of course, there is hardly a real threat. So, instead of sending thounds of people with bombs, at most tens of people are sent to "test the waters" (aka, the carinval game*) without bombs**. Because no bomb is used, you don't see record numbers of suicide bombers caught. Instead, you see huge "false positives" which provides the information to create a system to defeat the facial expression recognition system. And then you start loading people up with bombs.
Of course, the fact that you don't see more suicide bombings given that you *could* defeat the current system only shows that the threat is so minor, one might as well just not bother screening anyone. But, I guess, airlines like the free security guards.
*Note: I can't find a link describing it, but a nice paper was written about why racial profiling won't work. Basically, if one assumes that the system to game is monolithic then there is a monolithic system to beat. If the penalties are light for failing to game the system (carnival game), you can keep trying until you succeed. If the penalties are severe for failing to game the system (my earlier example where real bombs are used all the time), you just have to be willing/able to sustain substantial casualties with failure.
**This is the almost an example of "experienced suicide bombers" I spoke of. To be a successful suicide bomber, one needs to reach their target successfully and denoate their bomb. So, it is possible to train a suicide bomber with a known "possibly fake bomb" towards that end of their training.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. I'd even go as far as probably. But natural selection is defined in a very narrow scope (it's an intrinsic property of science to try to not overstate something when there's yet to be evidence to go along with it). So, I think it is more a matter of definition on what is included in natural selection. There is something like natural selection that exists and it applies in both the biological and the economical. But, the two aren't entirely the same. While the former strives to match the data, the latter tends to be based a little bit more on faith, working on a model that's known to fail (monopolies, a lack of perfect information, etc) to entirely explain what will happen.
It is for that reason that I, personally, am not so willing to dismiss the possibility that there is something beyond natural selection as a model that does work even if it doesn't "naturally" exist--naturally in the same way that while gasoline can burn and metals can be molded, you don't see internal combustion engines sprouting from the ground.
Ie, selection is chaotic/not predictable enough and dangerous to the survival of the human species.
I'm not sure if you're making two points or one point in this. If this were not a feedback mechanism but something else, and it was not clear how to accept/fight that something else, would you still say it is foolish to endeavor to make such plans? I ask because people have been dreamers for quite some time, making plans to either go with the accepted or fight against it. And, without those dreamers, we wouldn't have things like...well...almost everything technology wise (things that aren't the result of having accepting the status quo or rejecting it are reasonably rare) and probably in every field.
Now, if your argument was "well, we shouldn't fight against X because every alternative to X could be worse", I'd only point out that at least in the specific case, X seems like a very doomsday scenario already. Sure, there could still be circmstances worse caused by an alternative to X, and it's not like I was advocating simply taking any alternative up blindly. Afterall, I did say:
No, the conclusion merely advocates that since we know that X has identifyable problems, we should be keenly interested in searching for alternatives to X. It doesn't mean we should blindly abandon X today. It *does* mean we shouldn't blindly follow X under the presumption that it's the best system; we have good evidence that it is a system with several, probably catostrophic, flaws.
Having said all that, my main point wasn't to directly advocate the modified quote. It was mainly to make it a more valid conclusion (probably imperfect, but most conclusions include some bias) instead of a logical fallacy.
Really, I'm not sure *what* your point is, now. At first it sounded like you were mocking those who did the study because they drew a conclusion that was obvious to you (which is invariably the result of what happens when a study meets expected predictions). But, now it sounds like you're arguing that their conclusion is actually counter to what was shown in the study (which wouldn't be so much a "new revelation" to complain about but a simple "logical fallacy" to complain about).
And looking back over the quote (which I really hadn't thought about until now, since the quote hadn't seemed to be the real crux of the study or your complaint), I'd say it's a logical fallacy. Polynesians experienced natural selection. They didn't fight against it. It is natural selection (and market forces) that produce unsustainable situations which eventually lead to ecological/economic disaster. If anything, the point should be raised that one should be fighting *against* natural selection/market forces to counter this. But, then, just saying "don't do X" doesn't really tell one what *should* be done.
But, please do clarify what you meant, since I'm still not entirely sure how to take what you've said.
Gosh. Who would imagine that a part of science would be to confirm existing theories?
Well, it is. No one else had done such a study up to this point. Just because the revelation is "it's exactly what we expected" doesn't mean it wasn't a revelation. Up until the study was actually done, anyone who claimed to "know" what the result would be would invariably be speculating. Now, one could argue about the degree of uncertainty. But, every time another one of these studies are done instead of merely assuming the answer is know, the better capable of reducing the future uncertainty when speculation is invariably done.
But, yea, let's insult the nice scientists because they do studies to confirm things instead of boiling everything down to a system of unchanging beliefs. How's that working out for you?
Well, let's see. On the one hand, Microsoft is reporting recording earnings (IIRC) due in large part to Vista sales. On the other hand, they're trying to boost sales with a gimmicky prize/quiz thing. Sure, it's something that "happens in every business". But, not every business is a convincted monopolist with a basically guaranteed lock on the sale of their product (at some point, they can just raise the price of XP to push OEMs to go with Vista; IIRC, they did something similar in the past because, not surprisingly, a lot of people don't want to try out "the new cutting edge OS"--they want to use what they're familiar with and what all their local neighborhood geeks have years of experience dealing with).
/. article (and more importantly, the knowledge of the existance of the contest) to at least point out that MS wasn't so comfortable as to do away with "a common business tactic". Or, perhaps people should rely less on news reports (which are inherently bias towards reporting what's new and what's unexpected) and more on the collective samplings of the rantings of the thousands of people who write blogs and other journals. But, then, that's not something you can trivially cite to prove a point about the state of the world at some time in the past. *shrugs*
So, is it really newsworthy? I guess not. But, at least when in the future people talk about how "great Vista sales were" and "how unworried MS was", there's potentially a
That seems fair enough.
I see, so it sounds like Clinton and Bush did more or less precisely the same thing (although the former is too vague to be exactly sure).
Wow, you know, you've just went amazingly off-topic. Why, gosh, it's a good thing you didn't just ask someone else to stay on-topic. Otherwise, you'd look like a hypocrite.
Right, so when Bush loses emails, it's to protect the country. When Clinton loses emails, it's part of a blackmailing politicial enemy scheme. Or, wait, is that part of your off-topic analysis? Because if you really want to go off-topic, then you'd better go back to refute the original points made about what Bush has done to draw a comparison. Otherwise, you sound like as much of a hack as the person you're critiquing.
If you're torturing someone for evidence in a trial....
... and if it's not as a means to collect evidence for a trial, then clearly due process of law is not being followed, which means you can't torture the person* (ie, deprive them of life) or detain the person (ie, dperive them of liberty). Or, simple put, torture is prohibited by the 5th Amendment.
I always love it how those who wish to do narrow the rights of others so gravity towards focusing on a narrow interpretation of one Amendment or clause, completely disregarding how another smacks in the face of their analysis.
*Note: This isn't mean to say that you could legalize torture, just that this clause alone doesn't stipulate the absolute illegality of torutre.
Are "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS" pariahs? Are we "wasting our money" guarding any *other* criminal? The argument that our prisons are "overcrowded" is bullshit, quite frankly. We have chosen to not raise taxes to pay for more prisons because people have come to the mentality that criminals are unworthy of the money spent on them. Yet, the whole point of spending money on prisons is to avoid the problem we're having right now, of allowing criminals to not be punished appropriately resulting in society becoming a prison yard, all possible restricts applying.
That is a false analogy. The whole of the US is not the US government's private property. The government's job is not to prevent people from entering and exiting the country. It *is* their job to help assimilate people who enter the country, by providing them the means to become citizens (however dubious it is to allow a government to deny those who live in a country citizenship).
These being wasted doesn't make it a waste to secure the border. Nor was it being called a waste as a means to state that such should be the first thing considered to reduce the budget. Yet, it does remain a waste.
Sorry to break it to you, but we're not supposed to live in a stable society. A democracy is, by definition, all about the whim of the populace. In 50 years, we've went through communist scares, hippies, an explosion in drug use, the ultra-conservative religious right, and a "war on terror". With the rest of the world (ie, the other 80% or so) finally getting to the point where they might switch from developing to developed, the United States place in the world is almost certainly going to be radically altered. The isolationism of trying to exclude people to go in (or really, out) of the country is merely an attempt to slow down the globalization effect of having many developed societies where there is more worldwide consistentcy (if not stability) in society.
I don't think there's much of a choice in the matter, really. In the long term, democracies will flurish and treaties will bind many governments actions as one (look at the EU, for example). The United States kicking and biting to remain isolated is a move that will likely create a short-term depression and pain. Personally, I'd rather not go down that road. Just like I'd rather wish we hadn't gone down the road of heavy oil dependency after we saw the flaws of that in the 70s.
"Your" country isn't your private property. "Your" country is a democratic republic, where long ago it was recognized that trying to suppress every "neighbor" you don't like results in a tyranny of the masses (which can still occur, of course, if enough masses decide to alter their republic fundamentally). Why are you obsessed with the fact that your new neighbor came from Mexico instead of Oregon? Is i
So, we arrest gang members who *could* be convicted of a crime, deport them, wait for them to come back, and this time we're going to do what? Deport them again? Yea, I *so* like this plan of increasing border security. It'd be much too simple to just incarcerate those who commit crimes. Let's instead waste our money and time trying to guard thousands of miles of border while trying to keep the "bad people" out. Oh, and let's harrass everyone who does try to enter "legally" with degrading treatment (including searching their things) and even *more* invasive techniques to verify the person is who they claim they are. Because, you know, it's not a human right or anything for the free exercise of movement/travel.
It's funny you say that because such is probably inevitable. Imagine if, instead of pricing the product at $30, they had accidentally priced it at $4990. How many people would have simply thought Amazon was overly priced and either (a) spent their money elsewhere or (b) spent it on another good on the site, requiring Amazon to, once it realizes the mistake, undersell the CD collection (swallowing potentially thousands of dollars) to move inventory? Really, for something so vitally import, there really should be safeguards/procedures to avoid typos because there's more than one way for a typo to result in thousands of dollars worth of losses. Besides, isn't it economics who are so keen to see monetary punishment used as a means to inspire change in the deficits of the market?
I think you're missing his point. He isn't arguing against server side webapps. He's arguing against client side webapps. The former can do things like access databases (validating input and isolating the actual database) while the latter doesn't really improve on that situation (you can't trust a client to give valid input and if you did, you'd effectively removed a lot of isolation). Sure, there are a lot of people who would prefer a lot of the niceties that comes with javascript (a more malleable interface and sanity validating come to mind), but the GGP just doesn't feel that those extras are worth the security risk and so javascript shouldn't be a necessary step in functionality. I can't really say I disagree with him, if for no other reason that javascript doesn't necessarily exist everywhere, so a website that wants to be most accessible would have to make a non-javascript version anyways.
Ever since I've spent the time to actually think about "shouting fire in a crowded theater", I've come to realize that, if anything, such is probably the best example of something that *should* be protected speech. As a major point, crowds aren't inherently more stupid/dangerous than individuals. The only thing that grants them any sort of ability to act as such is the inability to establish individual actors in close quarters and that being realized translating into individuals being willing to do acts which they would not normally do alone (eg. trampling people). In fact, it is precise the work of trying to identify faces in a crowd that is seen as so draconian by governments, because people join crowds so they aren't personally required to support an idea.
But, that idea works in all ways. It is the reason why standing armies are so counter to a stable democracy and why private organizations in which people are willing to be supportive, possibly to the death, are so imperative. Now, this can obviously fracture into factions that fight for power and attempts might be made to use nationalism as a glue to keep people at peace (which is bad because that translates into standing armies). But, in the end, the real way to keep the peace is let people know that they are held accountable for their own actions, without the ability to use an organization as a shield (which is not to say an organization can't be a shield, but it is through the action of a collection of individuals that a shield is established, not the mere presence of those individuals). So, in the end, to punish the person who yells "Fire" instead of the people who mindlessly respond only supports the idea that the mob is able to do whatever acts it pleases so long as it can use a socially-accepted scapegoat. But, without a scapegoat, the crowd and the individuals would have to be held accountable. That is the real and more effective justice that should happen.
Out of curiosity, why did you group "Iraq and national defense" like that? Last I checked, Iraq wasn't banging at our doorstep in even a remotely indirect way. Further, last I heard, Ron Paul wasn't against "national defense", he was against excessive "national offense" (aka, going into other countries and behaving as world police). It's hard to believe that the US has any legitimate reason to be spending over 30% (40%? 50%? The numbers aren't entirely clear, especially considering standard of living wages.) of the world budget on military expenditures under a need for national "defense". No, the US has put it upon itself to be a "superpower" and to outspend every other country so that the world is under its thumb. That's *not* what the US Government is supposed to be doing.
Um, every dollar *anyone* takes in is taxed multiple times. The complaint is, you can either tax a very low rate on everyone (thereby quintuple dipping, as money cycles through) or you can push the tax rate much higher and push it on a subset of the potential tax payers (and try to only dip once). However, there's no way to avoid dipping multiple times (consumers buy, which goes to companies, which pay employees/shareholders (aka consumers), which as consumers buy, ...). And adding in exceptions only works to hide the tax costs of companies (if a company moves in and refuses to pay taxes, they'll just have to up the tax rate on all other tax payers to compensate (assuming they do and don't just run the government financially into the ground)). Beyond that, exceptions only further entangle the tax code, making it much harder to determine how costs are being hid and if the result of hiding has effectively reduced the amount paid by people in smaller loops.
Is there any truly fair tax system? Probably not. But, cries of being taxed multiple times is hardly the sort of thing that makes me hold pity on only *one* part of the tax paying base.
Investors who realize that if Microsoft is always forced to buy-out the latest technology, they will eventually implode as they try to graft together hundreds of questionably compatable technology to maintain their monopoly.
You conveniently skipped over option b, buying out a technology just to shelve it. There's also the point that option a usually comes with strings attached, specificially that Microsoft tends to Microsoftize anything they decide to buy-out and release as made by Microsoft. This leads to the following:
Webkit is an improvement off of KHTML. I can't say whether Google Earth, etc are improvements. I can't say OS X was really an improvement over BSD/NextOS technologies.
Very true. And a lot of the time, companies who buy out other companies and incorporate their technology either (a) simply rebrand the product without touching it otherwise or (b) radical altere it in a way that cripples the original use and/or misuses the clear potential of the product. Microsoft is certainly not the only company that buys out other companies/products. Microsoft just happens to do it a lot more than other companies and often does it more visibly than other companies. And that translates into, by raw numbers, Microsoft being near the top (if not the top) offender* of destroying the innovation of other companies.
*Yea, obviously, all the private companies and the private investors that sell out are just as guilty. But, again, we're talking raw numbers, not percentages.
God may or may not be knowable. He may or may not affect our reality. That which is unobservable may exist; it is just not provable. Something unknowable and unable to affect our reality is irrelevant; it still can exist.
Your self-righteous indignation against Christians, Muslims, etc doesn't provide an answer to potentially unanswerable questions. You can deny certain gods because they are required to have observable effects. You can deny certain gods because they are irrelevant. You can deny certain gods because they are amoral. But, none of that provides the certainty to know if a god does or not exist.
I can understand this. My experience with ZoneAlarm was similar, where I felt like I had more control over the situation than I had in the past. But, in the end, it is better to trust that the programs that you run won't "install crap". And if you really want, those that do "install crap" can be modified to not "install crap". Anything less, and you're still praying that an adverserial program doesn't figure out a way to do an end-run around you.
I liked this with Linux for a while, too. It felt great knowing that I was the one in control, not some program. But, in the end, I didn't want to be in control. Me being in control just meant that it was me who was responsible when something broke, even when I reasonably couldn't have known that my actions would break things. Instead of providing the means to undo potentially damaging actions, I was just given more rope to hang myself. Sure, the scary dialog box might stop or slow me down from changing "system settings". But, then, I have to wonder why, at times, I'm not given the flexability to expose some of the "safer" functions to a lower authority user account instead of having to take a leap of faith and give something full authority.
Those were neat in Linux, too. But why was I so obsessed with network activity and monitoring gadgets? Because I was so upset and afraid when one errant program would take up all of one system resource, causing my whole system to work so sluggishly the second another program wanted the tiniest slice of that resource for its own usage. I'd rather I didn't have to worry so much about such bottlenecks instead of having to glamarize the mundane monitoring tools just to keep my system working well.
Now, this is one of the few things I can get behind (although I do have complaints about having to encode/record video at set times instead of having on-demand access, but that's not something an OS can fix (or likely even a big company like MS)) rather fully. VCRs and Tivos sound great, but they're separate and disjoint, which only makes yet another separate thing that one has to hunt down and manage. It's much nicer to simplify things into a joint set to manage, and MS's file manager is rather decent at that.
I can't really comment on this, really. I'm just as afraid to use IIS as Apache, given that a misconfiguration could leave oneself open to attack. But, I hope that works out well for you.
I hope you enjoy them.
Um, you're missing my point. The point was is that, there are things that are definitely inside the scope of reality (black holes) and there are things that very probably are within the scope of reality (universe beyond the observable universe) that are unobservable/unknowable to humans. The realm of reality is not equivalent to what is knowable by humans.
Now you're either equivocating (by stating nothing unreal exist, where unreal happens to be defined as everything you consider preposterous) or stating a blatantly irrelevant tautology (that if you include everything that's part of reality in reality, there's nothing of reality in the inverse set of reality, but since the existance of God or not is unknown, nothing has been usefully said about the existance of God in the set of reality).
You, apparently, since you seem to be trying to create sets of the unreal. Personally, my discussion was about things that may or may not be part of reality and how observable they are.
A small point. We don't know *where* the lines of reality are. We can make tons of observations, try to be as consistent and mythodical as possible, and come up with amazing theories that can explain all that we've observed so far. But, they're all based upon such axioms as the universe doesn't fundamentally change over time or, if it does, it does so in a measureable way; universe laws are consistent across its entirity, or at least, any irregularities of universal laws are measureable and predictable; any interaction between our three dimensions of space and one of time are bidirectional with or through any higher dimensions that may exist, ie if our three dimensions of space and one of time intersect with another three dimensions of space and one of time, interactions will go both way in a profoundly measurable and predicable way; further, if there exists higher dimensional beings capable of interacting with the one or many 3 space, 1 times, those interactions are predictable and measureable enough to account for; and probably a whole host of other possibles that could possible compose reality.
Now, do I disbelieve any of the above things I posted in the above paragraph? Not particularly. But, I am very consciously aware that I have made a choice to choose a position on such subjects when there simply isn't enough evidence to be even scientificly confident about certain aspects of reality, at least as of yet. Having said that, I realize that probably a lot of the above paragraph is irrelevant in any case.
Just a small FYI, but I'm agnostic (overall). I'd claim myself as an athiest if it were feasible, but it's not (just to clarify, I'm athiest about the Christian God, but I'm not athiest about some god-like power, since a higher-dimensional being could exist and would be percieved to have god-like (by definition) powers of interaction; but, just because a god-like power could exist doesn't mean it does exist or has ever interacted with our three space, one time dimensional realm).
I haven't seen his work, and Wikipedia seems to h
True.
Um, no. Reality is what is. The perception of reality is separate from reality itself. To give two clearly known examples, consider the inside of a black hole and the Heisenburg uncertainly principle. In the former, black holes do exist (as far as we know), hence qualify as reality. But, there's no way to look inside a black hole. In the latter, the exact location and momentum of a particle might not be knowable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a particle doesn't have an exact location (well, a series of highly probable locations, including the sum locations of its waveform) and an exact momentum. There are clearly known to be things in science that are unseeable.
Um, you're mixing up two points to try to level a stronger case than you can make. As I've already shown, there are things in reality that humans know they can't know. Now, the specific examples I've given are things that, as far as is known by science, no being could know. But, it's not hard to imagine that there could exist things that humans can't know but other beings could (for example, any beings outside the observable universe would know things we cannot). Now, is this provable? Is it science? No. But the most reasonable standpoint isn't to make statements of certainty that, by definition, one can't know about.
And that's what connects back to your statement. Sure, religion is the same boat. It talks about things that are defined as unobservable by humans but do not provide the agency to explain how information transfer could occur. So, sure, it's unreasonable to believe that the Bible or the Quran prove anything about the unseen. It is reasonable to use things offered as seeable proof to disprove the Bible or the Quran. But, that only disproves the Bible or the Quran. It doesn't disprove the unseeable.
And just to drive the point home, let me give you an example. If I flip a coin and someone else, without seeing the coin, makes a statement of fact that the coin is heads, disproving that they couldn't know the answer doesn't magically force the coin to be tails. It only disproves their ability to make accurate assertions about the state of the coin.
And if the magazines a printer prints are more or less popular has no effect on the revenue stream of the printer?
They're both, but they're given the same sort of protection that common carriers are. And in return, they have to follow certain procedures to maintain neutrality.
Because YouTube isn't a newspaper, just like the phone company or /. isn't a newspaper. The conscious choice to abdicate oneself from editorial control is precisely because (a) it holds the poster responsible for their own post, (b) it allows less bias to be expressed by editors, and (c) it allows for a much larger volume of content to be passed through the phone company/YouTube than would be realistically possible if everything had to get a "seal of approval". Now, does this mean YouTube or the phone company gets to act with no regard to the people/the government? No. It means that they're afforded some liability protection in exchange for things like (a) promptly removing alledged infringing material, (b) being prevented from going out and censoring content that they disapprove of, and (c) not being allowed to advertise their service precisely for its unlawful uses.
Um, because it's quicker/easier to search by a song name than to first search for a band name, then navigate a site?
Btw, it's great to know you've done a survey to find out that "legal MP3s just aren't redistributed much". Are you also for tapping and filtering phone lines because "legal [phone usage] just [doesn't happen] much"? I mean, I really love your approach to fixing criminal problems. Don't hold the people accountable who are commiting the actual crime. Instead, go after the people who "faciliate" the crime. Btw, since there's a gas tax to faciliate road repair, does that mean every single high speed chase, speeding ticket, etc means the government can be charged with conspiracy and aiding and abetting? I mean, they sure have an interest in seeing people using their gas less efficiently, resulting in larger gas tax revenue.
PS - I don't search for illegal music. But, then, I rather like game music and there's lots of nice people who post content to ocremix.org. Of course, I presume that there's more than ocremix.org out there for such content. But, you know, I guess I can't be allowed to search for it because of all the people who would dare to do something illegal.
Um, no. Beethoven was able to write music because he was a damn good musician. Further, Beethoven wrote music because he wanted to. If deafness could not stop Beethoven, I very much doubt a lack of patrons would have stopped him. Now, would Beethoven be as well known with him writing the music and hearing it in his head but without a piano to play it or a captive audience to listen? Very probably not. But, that's a rather different issue.
Out of curiosity, what would this "additional metadata" be? The general complaint, as I understand it, is pretty simple: instead of supporting specification X properly, Microsoft is supporting specification X' when it sees data in specification X format, with the ability to render specification X properly if you throw in some extra metadata. Now, this is entirely *backwards* to how you follow the specification. If Microsoft wanted to, say, support specification X and add metadata to support their own custom, non-standard X', that'd be up to them, and I don't think people would be upset. But, at the point that Microsoft demands that you add in extra metadata *outside the specification* just so that a document will render properly, Microsoft has effectively redefined the specification. That, around these parts, is known as "embrace and extend". It also smacks of them being able to really claim they, for example, can pass the Acid2 test.
And if you have a better idea on how to end the use of illegal drugs in the US... Have you ever considered that when people complain about the War on Drugs or Microsoft's lack of standards compliance that there's a reason? Have you ever considered that you can't simply redefine the situation--built-in with a set of assumptions of what must happen--to ignore the valid complaints that wish to evoke change away from what is happening?
It is the wrong approach. The *right* approach is working to be standards compliant, backwards compatibility possibly be damned. And if Microsoft fucks up again (not that I'd blame them, since it's really hard to be standards complaint as standards are almost always ambiguous), they can break compatibility again moving from IE8 to IE9. The end goal is to move as many people to writing standards complaint pages as soon as possible. If people really want to, they can continue to run IE7 or IE6 (although MS sure can try to fight it) to view older data. The longer that non-standard compliant browsers exist, the longer *new* data is written out of compliance and that only further delays having a platform-independent information medium.
Not so much.
More, they're trying to bribe people to continue to use their service, since one's service being incredibly flakey to new users is a horrible first impression.
Right, but then a refund would be actual compensation.
Assuming that next month's service actually works and there's no extenuating circumstances, you're probably right.
It's funny. You seem to be arguing that MS may or may not be legally bound to provide compensation for failing to provide services paid for, yet you think asking a court to decide in a class-action lawsuit (ie, one lawsuit on behalf of all users to simplify the ruling/situation) is "over the top". How *else* do you suppose that people be assured the knowledge and backing to obtain adequate and correct (as legally determined) compensation? Wishful thinking?
There is no "implied license" to read a book or run software. There is the innate property that possession of a copyrighted work allows one to read, run, etc that work. Further, copying is only nationally restricted under copyright law, for which fair use and/or existing statues within copyright (such as specifically allowing copying if it's necessary to use software, can reasonably be said to void any need for the copyright holder's approval in copying to use software. Further, perhaps you've not heard the story of First Sale Doctrine. Specificially:
Ie, EULAs don't magically stick to software (or books) and magically override statutory rights. Offering "a way out" doesn't work any more than it'd be legal to try to force a contract to override legal statute; imagine the absurdity, for example, of trying to claim it were legal to offer a car which included an EULA that stipulated that the car manufacturer could commit identity theft on the owner without any resolution, but the owner could return the car to opt out of the EULA. Why would you think an EULA, even if agreed to, could remove or override in any way explicit statutory rights?
Yes and no (I'll get to this later, since it's sort of a side issue). The main problem is, any selective screening process is inherently inferior to random sampling in the long term. If you have a genuinely determined foe, they won't send merely one suicide bomber; they will send thousands. And of those thousands, some will get through. With a selective screening process, it is possible for your foe to eventually determine what traits for their suicide bombers to not have; then they can train/select such individuals. With random sampling, there is no way to game the system.
Of course, there is hardly a real threat. So, instead of sending thounds of people with bombs, at most tens of people are sent to "test the waters" (aka, the carinval game*) without bombs**. Because no bomb is used, you don't see record numbers of suicide bombers caught. Instead, you see huge "false positives" which provides the information to create a system to defeat the facial expression recognition system. And then you start loading people up with bombs.
Of course, the fact that you don't see more suicide bombings given that you *could* defeat the current system only shows that the threat is so minor, one might as well just not bother screening anyone. But, I guess, airlines like the free security guards.
*Note: I can't find a link describing it, but a nice paper was written about why racial profiling won't work. Basically, if one assumes that the system to game is monolithic then there is a monolithic system to beat. If the penalties are light for failing to game the system (carnival game), you can keep trying until you succeed. If the penalties are severe for failing to game the system (my earlier example where real bombs are used all the time), you just have to be willing/able to sustain substantial casualties with failure.
**This is the almost an example of "experienced suicide bombers" I spoke of. To be a successful suicide bomber, one needs to reach their target successfully and denoate their bomb. So, it is possible to train a suicide bomber with a known "possibly fake bomb" towards that end of their training.