I personally think the association between, for example, slavery and failed civilizations can be explained without saying those civilizations were disfavored because God dislikes slavery. There are plenty of mundane mechanisms by which societal acceptance of wrong things can cause societies to fail. Both theories fit the data, but the mundane explanation relies on fewer unknowns.
Certainly some Christians in the south spoke out against slavery. But my understanding is that most slave owners would have called themselves Christian. Christianity, as well as any other major religion, has spoken out against some bad things, but has ignored others at times. No religion has a perfect track record, which I take as evidence that they are all, at best, approximations of morality (as is law).
Again, I think that the actual source of "morality" is cultural (and to some degree, biological) evolution - those cultures (and species) that didn't enforce beneficial codes of conduct failed. Christianity, most other religions, and several philosophical theories (like the theory I'm promoting) only justify and explain this morality. But morality exists independently of them.
Bad isn't what society says is bad for it; it's what is bad for it - a subtle but important distinction. Society doesn't define bad things; bad things are defined in relation to it. Slavery is bad because if some of us were slave drivers, some of us would be slaves, which would be bad. It's essentially the Golden Rule, which is part of most religions, but which anyone, regardless of their theological beliefs, can follow.
Did some societies say slavery was okay at certain points in time? Yes. But they were wrong. The north was more advanced than the south during the American Civil War, and most of the world is much more advanced than those places that still have slavery. Slavery was bad for these people, they just didn't know it. (Sorta like how DRM will be bad for the RIAA, but they want it anyway.) And religion certainly didn't speak out against slavery in those societies where slavery was accepted. Which it apparently would have, if it were the source of morals, which it isn't.
True, religion is too vague a term. I guess I'm talking about mainstream religions. (Do you want me to name a specific faith? Sorry.) And I think mainstream religions preach acceptable morals for the same reason that suicide cults aren't mainstream: those that didn't wouldn't have lasted much longer than the suicide cults.
To be totally honest, religion annoys me considerably, especially when it interferes with science. But it has been generally a positive influence.
Now, I'm a UK citizen and I'm 100% happy for my national laws to be used to shut down such a site.
What is free speech? I live in a democracy that allows me, should I so wish, to *campaign* for the legalisation for necrophilia. I can talk to anyone and everyone about it....
Aren't those statements contradictory? You can talk about something, but you can't put up a website about it? What's the difference?
Really? How's that? I mean... from what authority can a moral code be derived?
Please tell me you're joking.
People refrain from doing bad things because they've been indoctrinated against such things, by their parents and by their society. It has nothing to do with deriving a moral code from an authority, or even fearing God's wrath. Societies do this simply because if everyone did bad things, the society would fail before it had a chance to indoctrinate the next generation.
Religion is one of many morality indoctrination methods that formed as successful societies evolved. It has the advantage that if one can't understand "don't do this because if everyone did, our society would fail," one can at least understand "don't do this or you'll burn."
So religion is a good thing, but it's not the source of morals.
The government isn't taking your liberty from you. Your fellow citizens are. They are responsible for voting your government into power.
Bzzzt. Did any of the candidates in 2000 say, "If you vote me, I promise to sign as many Orwellian bills as I can."? Didn't think so. Sure, you can blame parties after the fact, but the voting public has little influence on the future.
I don't like the Republicans either, but then, Clinton passed the DMCA. My point is that it's not one party or the other; the whole system is flawed.
I was referring to the RIAA as a whole, not them with respect to one song. The majority of commercial music comes from RIAA members, and they got sued for price fixing, which is good.
If you have no spam filters, then classifying email amounts to "delete, delete, delete, delete, down-arrow, delete, delete, down-arrow, delete, delete, whoops!" That one mistake just dropped your average to 90%. Frankly, I'm amazed humans scored as well as they did.
I don't know exactly how this will be implemented, but it's quite possible that it will only take a kernel change. (I'm assuming here that the executable formats include enough information to determine what areas of memory shouldn't be executed.) So with assistance from Microsoft (and a small patch for Linux), it could work.
This could still break some apps which rely on executing some area of memory that they didn't mark as such, but you could just make an exec-time option to run that program without protection.
I'm intrigued, because in my experience, network card support is pretty good. (It's harder to sell network cards without Linux support than it is to sell, say, Winmodems.) Please reply, or email if you prefer, everything you know about your network card. Maybe I can make sense of it.
There's a big difference between individual rights and corporate rights.
Also, a monopoly is one of the conditions where a market economy fails. If there's no competition, prices don't drop. If one organization owns all the means of production in an industry, it's only nominally different from a command economy. We learned this the hard way in the days of Standard Oil, and passed laws against abuse of monopoly power.
If you remember that, I probably am a kid to you, and all I know about NeWS is what I just read in the PDF I linked to. That said, supposedly it failed because it wasn't "shared," so it couldn't become the LCD.
But I do think it's possible for the XFree86 server to be replaced in a matter of years, though the X11R6 protocol may live on indefinitely, just as some widget sets have. The key will be interoperability.
If a Y server can use binary X drivers, speak the X11R6 protocol, offer SDL bindings, work on Win32, have bindings to Qt, GTK, and wxWindows, and do this with comparable speed to XFree86, then it will be a drop-in replacement for X. And since it also does Y and offers a consistent UI, it would become the lowest common denominator.
It would be a lot of work to make all this interoperability work, but I'll maintain the naive hope that it can happen.
That is, essentially, what Y Windows does. Widgets are maintained as objects on the server, so apps just have to create them and notice when they're changed.
There's a ton of information about how this works in this PDF.
From what I've read, it's exactly what I want (and have been advocating.) My money was on PicoGUI, but hey - competition is good.
Pulling over every thirty minutes would wake you up, yes. But going 0-70 on the shoulder and merging into traffic is pretty dangerous. Even being on the shoulder is dangerous. Especially if everyone else is taking the test while whizzing by you at 75.
The law will mandate ignition interlocks on cars sold in New Mexico. Wouldn't everyone just buy cars out-of-state? Luckily, it means the New Mexico auto dealerships will lobby it into the ground long before 2008.
I do not pirate music, and though I feel copyright law needs serious reform, I respect it. But I still hate the RIAA because of the underhanded things they do. They've lobbied for the DMCA and even stricter laws, they are trying to close open computing architectures against us, and they are trying to centralize and destroy the very fabric of the Internet. Oh, and they sue people. They do these things simply to protect themselves. Suing people is the lesser of these evils.
Most people infringe copyright because:
People want music.
Copyright infringement is currently easier than buying the works.
People don't fear getting caught.
Obviously, the industry wants people to want music, so they can't mess with 1.
There are two ways to eliminate problem 2. The most damaging way is to make copyright infringement harder, because that involves destroying the Internet. The non-destructive way to eliminate problem 2 is to offer cheap, non-DRM music downloads to as many people as possible (minors included), but this is only easy when the problem 3 is dealt with.
The only real way to eliminate problem 3 is suing people. It doesn't take many people getting in trouble to scare the general public away from copyright infringement, especially if there are easier alternatives (see above). I think it's great that they're doing this, because it allows them to offer cheap unencumbered music downloads, which is much better than their current policy of corrupting our government and destroying the Internet.
I think evolution can predict a lot more than just continued extinctions. For example, we could predict that new fossils we find will be related to species we know about. Or if there is a large gap in the fossil record, we could predict that there might be an intermediate form. Evolution can explain basic properties of life, like self-preservation and reproductive instincts, and basic similarities, like DNA, cells, and proteins, which we would expect to see in any other forms of life.
All of these predictions are testable. If we find life that isn't related to that life we know about, we'd need to change or abandon the theory. If there are large gaps we can't explain, we would need updated theories, like punctuated equilibrium, to explain how A can evolve into B. Evolution would be hard-pressed to explain life without self-preservation instincts or without proteins. But there haven't been, to our knowledge, any contradictions like this.
All of these predictions are based on historical evidence, which is expected because most evolution happens very slowly. But there really isn't anything wrong with "reactionary" theories - they're better than cop-out answers, which I consider creationism to be. But evolution predicts other things which can be verified in the lab - the natural selection of moths, development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, and even speciation in fruit flies and the like.
Most interesting to me, evolution as a process can be applied in more ways than simply to explain life on earth. You can use it to describe market economics. You can even use it to design circuits, programs, and robotics.
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious bitmaps is not to view them. Rather, download the file with wget and open it in a hex editor. If the byte at offset 0xE is 0x28, then the two little-endian four-byte unsigned integers starting at offset 0x12 are the width and height, respectively.
In the interest of fairness, here is an evolution supporting sentence that will probably be modded down: The reason why posts that malign evolution or advocate intelligent design get modded Troll, Flamebait, and Overrated is simply because Slashdot doesn't have an Incorrect mod.
Now to save my karma: Questioning evolution is good. But a valid question would take the form, "If evolution is valid, how do you explain (insert observation here)?" Instead, most "questions" are taking the form "I don't think there's enough evidence," which is far to vague. What specific observation leads you to disbelieve evolution?
Also, a theory must do more than just explain observations. It also needs some predictive power - this both increases our knowledge and provides a path for revisions to the theory. This is where intelligent design fails: It can always explain observations ("God did it.") but if you ask "Will this bacteria become resistant," the answer is, "He didn't say."
Re:Only so much carbon...
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 1
By your slightly more generous size estimate:
(6400000000 people * 5 ft * 2 ft * 1 ft) ^ (1 / 3) / 5280 =.76 miles.
So yes, a three-quarters of a mile wide cube would be about right.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly some Christians in the south spoke out against slavery. But my understanding is that most slave owners would have called themselves Christian. Christianity, as well as any other major religion, has spoken out against some bad things, but has ignored others at times. No religion has a perfect track record, which I take as evidence that they are all, at best, approximations of morality (as is law).
Again, I think that the actual source of "morality" is cultural (and to some degree, biological) evolution - those cultures (and species) that didn't enforce beneficial codes of conduct failed. Christianity, most other religions, and several philosophical theories (like the theory I'm promoting) only justify and explain this morality. But morality exists independently of them.
Oddly, yes.
Did some societies say slavery was okay at certain points in time? Yes. But they were wrong. The north was more advanced than the south during the American Civil War, and most of the world is much more advanced than those places that still have slavery. Slavery was bad for these people, they just didn't know it. (Sorta like how DRM will be bad for the RIAA, but they want it anyway.) And religion certainly didn't speak out against slavery in those societies where slavery was accepted. Which it apparently would have, if it were the source of morals, which it isn't.
True, religion is too vague a term. I guess I'm talking about mainstream religions. (Do you want me to name a specific faith? Sorry.) And I think mainstream religions preach acceptable morals for the same reason that suicide cults aren't mainstream: those that didn't wouldn't have lasted much longer than the suicide cults.
To be totally honest, religion annoys me considerably, especially when it interferes with science. But it has been generally a positive influence.
What is free speech? I live in a democracy that allows me, should I so wish, to *campaign* for the legalisation for necrophilia. I can talk to anyone and everyone about it. ...
Aren't those statements contradictory? You can talk about something, but you can't put up a website about it? What's the difference?
Really? How's that? I mean... from what authority can a moral code be derived?
Please tell me you're joking.
People refrain from doing bad things because they've been indoctrinated against such things, by their parents and by their society. It has nothing to do with deriving a moral code from an authority, or even fearing God's wrath. Societies do this simply because if everyone did bad things, the society would fail before it had a chance to indoctrinate the next generation.
Religion is one of many morality indoctrination methods that formed as successful societies evolved. It has the advantage that if one can't understand "don't do this because if everyone did, our society would fail," one can at least understand "don't do this or you'll burn."
So religion is a good thing, but it's not the source of morals.
There's more than one person here, so pointing out each instance where their opinions differ isn't really necessary.
Bzzzt. Did any of the candidates in 2000 say, "If you vote me, I promise to sign as many Orwellian bills as I can."? Didn't think so. Sure, you can blame parties after the fact, but the voting public has little influence on the future.
I don't like the Republicans either, but then, Clinton passed the DMCA. My point is that it's not one party or the other; the whole system is flawed.
I was referring to the RIAA as a whole, not them with respect to one song. The majority of commercial music comes from RIAA members, and they got sued for price fixing, which is good.
If you have no spam filters, then classifying email amounts to "delete, delete, delete, delete, down-arrow, delete, delete, down-arrow, delete, delete, whoops!" That one mistake just dropped your average to 90%. Frankly, I'm amazed humans scored as well as they did.
Obviously his analogy was to illustrate the evils that can result from making a choice based entirely on the choices of others.
This could still break some apps which rely on executing some area of memory that they didn't mark as such, but you could just make an exec-time option to run that program without protection.
I'm intrigued, because in my experience, network card support is pretty good. (It's harder to sell network cards without Linux support than it is to sell, say, Winmodems.) Please reply, or email if you prefer, everything you know about your network card. Maybe I can make sense of it.
Also, a monopoly is one of the conditions where a market economy fails. If there's no competition, prices don't drop. If one organization owns all the means of production in an industry, it's only nominally different from a command economy. We learned this the hard way in the days of Standard Oil, and passed laws against abuse of monopoly power.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to be. But not how it is in Microsoft's compilers (at least up to VC++ 6).
But I do think it's possible for the XFree86 server to be replaced in a matter of years, though the X11R6 protocol may live on indefinitely, just as some widget sets have. The key will be interoperability.
If a Y server can use binary X drivers, speak the X11R6 protocol, offer SDL bindings, work on Win32, have bindings to Qt, GTK, and wxWindows, and do this with comparable speed to XFree86, then it will be a drop-in replacement for X. And since it also does Y and offers a consistent UI, it would become the lowest common denominator.
It would be a lot of work to make all this interoperability work, but I'll maintain the naive hope that it can happen.
Heck, I once wanted to work for Microsoft. Opinions can change.
I've seen those FBI warnings on DVDs as well as tapes. The funny part is that, judging from their image quality, I'd guess they were copied from VHS!
There's a ton of information about how this works in this PDF.
From what I've read, it's exactly what I want (and have been advocating.) My money was on PicoGUI, but hey - competition is good.
The law will mandate ignition interlocks on cars sold in New Mexico. Wouldn't everyone just buy cars out-of-state? Luckily, it means the New Mexico auto dealerships will lobby it into the ground long before 2008.
Most people infringe copyright because:
Obviously, the industry wants people to want music, so they can't mess with 1.
There are two ways to eliminate problem 2. The most damaging way is to make copyright infringement harder, because that involves destroying the Internet. The non-destructive way to eliminate problem 2 is to offer cheap, non-DRM music downloads to as many people as possible (minors included), but this is only easy when the problem 3 is dealt with.
The only real way to eliminate problem 3 is suing people. It doesn't take many people getting in trouble to scare the general public away from copyright infringement, especially if there are easier alternatives (see above). I think it's great that they're doing this, because it allows them to offer cheap unencumbered music downloads, which is much better than their current policy of corrupting our government and destroying the Internet.
All of these predictions are testable. If we find life that isn't related to that life we know about, we'd need to change or abandon the theory. If there are large gaps we can't explain, we would need updated theories, like punctuated equilibrium, to explain how A can evolve into B. Evolution would be hard-pressed to explain life without self-preservation instincts or without proteins. But there haven't been, to our knowledge, any contradictions like this.
All of these predictions are based on historical evidence, which is expected because most evolution happens very slowly. But there really isn't anything wrong with "reactionary" theories - they're better than cop-out answers, which I consider creationism to be. But evolution predicts other things which can be verified in the lab - the natural selection of moths, development of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, and even speciation in fruit flies and the like.
Most interesting to me, evolution as a process can be applied in more ways than simply to explain life on earth. You can use it to describe market economics. You can even use it to design circuits, programs, and robotics.
Now, get some graph paper and crayons...
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Now to save my karma: Questioning evolution is good. But a valid question would take the form, "If evolution is valid, how do you explain (insert observation here)?" Instead, most "questions" are taking the form "I don't think there's enough evidence," which is far to vague. What specific observation leads you to disbelieve evolution?
Also, a theory must do more than just explain observations. It also needs some predictive power - this both increases our knowledge and provides a path for revisions to the theory. This is where intelligent design fails: It can always explain observations ("God did it.") but if you ask "Will this bacteria become resistant," the answer is, "He didn't say."