Ok, suppose I'm a follower of Christ, an apostle. I've seen him with my own eyes, listened to him speak. Good guy. Then the Romans kill him, nail him to a cross. So me and my buddies, we decide to steal the body and concoct this resurrection story. We know it's a fraud, but nobody else does, so we keep our day jobs and go around telling everybody what we've "seen." Some years later, I'm jailed. They're telling me I'm going to be killed. Would I be willing to die for something that I knew was fraudulent, because I was one of the guys who dreamed it up?
That tired old argument depends on the false premise that people only believe things that are true. Fervent belief does not equate to proof. If it did, then there must have really been a spaceship behind the Hale-Bopp comet that came to take the souls of the Heaven's Gate cultists away. After all, they believed so strongly they killed themselves in anticipation of the spaceship.
Your rejection of God Almighty is a religious choice, not a scientific conclusion.
From a burden of proof standpoint, the person who never heard of God is no different than the one who has heard of the idea and doesn't believe it. You don't add any extra burden of proof to me by stating theories in my presence that I don't agree with. It wasn't a "rejection of God" until someone else proposed the existence of god.
No. If someone ELSE does something that changes MY property in ways I didn't ask for, I am in no way responsible to change how I use that property because of what someone ELSE did to it.
If I stuff $5 in your pocket and run away, you are NOT stealing if you go and make use of that $5.
So you're saying the right course of action would have been for the farmer to cull his OWN CROP of the plants that had been accidentally contaminated, and deliberately choose to only use those seeds that had not come from Monsanto-contaminated pollination? Bull. Keep in mind that the plants that produced the seed were his OWN CROP on his OWN PROPERTY that had been forced to produce the patented seed through no action of his own. So now Monsanto has the right to say any plants that YOU paid for, that YOU cared for, that are on YOUR land that just happen to get cross-pollinated by your neighbor's Monsanto crop are no longer your own plants that you can do with what you will.
If you agree that that's right, then you are agreeing that it's okay for Monsanto to steal ownership ofa portion of a farmer's crop.
It should have been blatantly obvious from his post that he interpeted "x is ten times less than y" to mean x = y - 10*y. NOT (-1) x*y, as you imply. Go to school indeed. The right way to phrase what you meant is "x is one tenth of y".
The guy KNEW it was monsanto's seed. It wasn't forced on him.
Yes it was. Whether he was aware of the way in which his plants had been changed is irrelevant. He didn't ASK to have them changed. It happened through the actions of other forces not under his control (his neighbors, the wind, and Monsanto. The plants in question were HIS OWN. Monsanto ended up vandalizing his crop, so to speak.
If I steal a can of spray paint and use it to spray grafitti on your house, you shouldn't be obligated to pay the store for the paint should you choose to keep the grafitti in place.
Remember, we have 10x less population, over a larger area,
"10x less population" would only make mathematical sense if it was possible for Canada to have a negative population. (With Canada having negative 9x as many people as the US.) I'm not even sure what a negative population would mean (people made of antimatter?) I think you meant "One tenth the population", which isn't the same thing.
And the population density has nothing to do with why Canada's legal system has more grey areas. Canada's legal system is more grey because it is more directly derived from the British system, which is more grey than the US system. And Britain most certainly isn't less densely populated than the US.
Which also explains why I didn't know that the US encourages people to give blood by paying them.
The other reason you might not know that is because it's not actually true. Firstly, giving plasma is a little different than giving blood. Secondly, the US isn't doing it - companies within the US are doing it. The only role the US is playing here is that it refrains from making it illegal.
"God wasn't the creator" is not a presupposition. It's the default hypothesis until evidence sways us otherwise. NOT believing a theory yet is the default, and in the case for God, the ones who say "yes, god exists" are the ones that have taken on 100% of the burden of proof.
Just because a bit of information doesn't answer ONE particular question doesn't mean it's irrelevant. If life came to earth from a meteor hit, that would have many relevant repercussions, including:
1 - We would know it's a waste of time to try to figure out how life began in the universe in general by looking at the evidence available here on Earth.
2 - We would know life on other worlds must exist, or at the very least, must have existed in the past.
Does someone out there know, for the purpose of understanding this article, what is the difference between:
1 - A cell which is called "organic". and
2 - A cell which is called "inorganic".
From a purely scientific (philosophically materialist) standpoint, what is the difference between a small self contained replicating machine and a small self contained replicating organism?
The problem with this kind of study (and I'm also including the ones by IBM that favor Linux over Windows in this) is that there is no general case that you can model results for. All these studies assume too many specific things about the "typical workplace" and "typical server needs" and "typical staff" that are not universal, and then have the hubris to take their conclusion and make the bold public statement that it applies universally. TCO calculations are especially prone to this since TCO depends largely on the staff's ability and willingness to learn the technology, and that's not the same for every situation. For us at work, Windows would be more expensive than Linux simply because we don't like it, and thus would spend the minimum time necessary to learn how to make it work just barely for us.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to arrest because your car was used in a bank robbery."
"What? But I reported that car stolen a week ago."
"Yes, but it's still your fault."
"Huh??!"
"Well, if you hadn't chosen to drive it to a bad neighborhood and park it while you went into a store, the bank robbers wouldn't have been able to use it in the robbery."
"But that's preposterous! You can't say it's my fault!"
"Hey, you can be held responsible for laws you didn't break, if your actions caused laws to be broken later in ways you didn't control. Didn't you know that? At least according to this guy "lobsterGun" on slashdot."
Once again you feel to see the obvious alternatives and then assume there are none.
Once again you belittle people to disagree with you, based on the haughty misconception that they're saying something stupider than they really are. If 'div' is the integer division operator, and '/' is only for floats, then if you change one of your int variables to a float or one of your floats to an int, you have to go find everywhere it is used and change the operator for, what is in my opinion no good reason.
Where is your alleged alternative to that that I'm allegedly not seeing? Or were you assuming I was saying something stupider?
Taking this back to the beginning, what I don't understand is why any programmer worth his pay woud be writing code that said x = (divide one by two) * y in the first place. The sane way to write it is x = y / 2, which not only doesn't have the "problem" you point out, but is quicker to execute (both because if x and y are ints it avoids floating point calculations, and because it has less operations), simpler to look at, and avoids any dependance on the language's order of operations which also improves readabilty. (Some languages take multiplication and division to be of equal precedence, some do not, so x = 1/2*y might end up meaning x="one over two Y" to some people's way of thinking. Granted that's only a problem for people who don't have a comfortable feel of the language yet, but then again so is the "problem" your sig brings up.)
That is a terrible solution. It makes more sense to say the type of the operands used determines which type of operation to do. If x and y are floats, what does x div y mean? floor(x/y) or floor(x)/floor(y)? They aren't the same thing. Or does the language just punt and say it's a compile time error to use div on floats?
The DMCA also criminalizes the source code, or any abstract description of the algorithm in a human language like English. It makes it illegal to "blow the whistle" on a company that's lying about how good their encryption is, for example.
I just didn't want people going off on what a terrible law it is, or that it violated free speech.
There is a difference between "the law is bad" and "the court thinks that the law is bad". I am in no way obligated to agree with the court in its decision, and so pointing out that Elcomsoft lost the court case in no way stops me from going off on what a terrible law it is, or that it violates free speech.
If you choose to do business in a country, your business actions in that country are subject to the laws of that country. So the instant Elcomsoft knowingly sold its first copy of the program to a US citizen, the DMCA had jurisdiction over that act. You are right the DMCA has no jurisdiction over Dmitry - he wasn't involved in sales, so he wasn't the one violating the DMCA by choosing to provide the product to US citizens. But the company itself is under the jursdiction.
The possible punishments are limited, though. At most the US can tell Elcomsoft it is not allowed to do business inside the US.
But that case would have been harder to prosecute. The DMCA pushers want to stay clear of the anti-free speech aspects of the bill for now until they get a few convictions under their belts using just the 'selling software that exploits the holes' part of the bill. Even tech-clueless people who otherwise support the trampling of fair-use rights would sympathise with Dimitri if he was branded a crimnal for merely giving a speech.
Your analogy doesn't hold. Opium is illegal in MANY countries. Dimitry's software was illegal ONLY IN THE USA, which is NOT where he wrote it, and the decision to sell the product to the USA was not his decision, and it's entirely possible he didn't even know about it.
The fact that THIS trial is not for Dimitry doesn't invalide what the poster said. A year and a half ago he *was* arrested because of his *employer's* decision to sell software he wrote in a foreign country where it was illegal. And that arrest is the reason he's forced to testify now in this trial. He had to agree to testify in order to be let go last year, even though he shouldn't ever have been arrested in the first place because the DMCA was violated not by him, but by other people in the company he had no control over - specifily the ones who decided to sell his software in the US.
Its easy for you to say that because you are not the person on trial here.
And neither is Dimitry. It's the company he worked for that's on trial. Dimitry's role in this case is purely as a witness. When he agreed to testify, Dimitry got off the hook with regards to the case agaisnt him personally. And that *is* an improvement over the way things looked when he was first arrested. A year and a half ago, in addition to the normal injusticies of the DMCA, there was the fact that they were going after Dimitry when it was actually his employer that committed the violation without his input. The DMCA wasn't violated until his employer chose to sell his software in the US market. What Dimitry did was perfectly legal in Russia where he did it. It was his employer that decided to sell that software in a country where it was illegal to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
That tired old argument depends on the false premise that people only believe things that are true. Fervent belief does not equate to proof. If it did, then there must have really been a spaceship behind the Hale-Bopp comet that came to take the souls of the Heaven's Gate cultists away. After all, they believed so strongly they killed themselves in anticipation of the spaceship.
From a burden of proof standpoint, the person who never heard of God is no different than the one who has heard of the idea and doesn't believe it. You don't add any extra burden of proof to me by stating theories in my presence that I don't agree with. It wasn't a "rejection of God" until someone else proposed the existence of god.
Get back to me when you have something intelligent to say.
Unless the language you are trying to speak is English.
No. If someone ELSE does something that changes MY property in ways I didn't ask for, I am in no way responsible to change how I use that property because of what someone ELSE did to it.
If I stuff $5 in your pocket and run away, you are NOT stealing if you go and make use of that $5.
So you're saying the right course of action would have been for the farmer to cull his OWN CROP of the plants that had been accidentally contaminated, and deliberately choose to only use those seeds that had not come from Monsanto-contaminated pollination? Bull. Keep in mind that the plants that produced the seed were his OWN CROP on his OWN PROPERTY that had been forced to produce the patented seed through no action of his own. So now Monsanto has the right to say any plants that YOU paid for, that YOU cared for, that are on YOUR land that just happen to get cross-pollinated by your neighbor's Monsanto crop are no longer your own plants that you can do with what you will.
If you agree that that's right, then you are agreeing that it's okay for Monsanto to steal ownership ofa portion of a farmer's crop.
It should have been blatantly obvious from his post that he interpeted "x is ten times less than y" to mean x = y - 10*y. NOT (-1) x*y, as you imply. Go to school indeed. The right way to phrase what you meant is "x is one tenth of y".
Yes it was. Whether he was aware of the way in which his plants had been changed is irrelevant. He didn't ASK to have them changed. It happened through the actions of other forces not under his control (his neighbors, the wind, and Monsanto. The plants in question were HIS OWN. Monsanto ended up vandalizing his crop, so to speak.
If I steal a can of spray paint and use it to spray grafitti on your house, you shouldn't be obligated to pay the store for the paint should you choose to keep the grafitti in place.
"10x less population" would only make mathematical sense if it was possible for Canada to have a negative population. (With Canada having negative 9x as many people as the US.) I'm not even sure what a negative population would mean (people made of antimatter?) I think you meant "One tenth the population", which isn't the same thing.
And the population density has nothing to do with why Canada's legal system has more grey areas. Canada's legal system is more grey because it is more directly derived from the British system, which is more grey than the US system. And Britain most certainly isn't less densely populated than the US.
The other reason you might not know that is because it's not actually true. Firstly, giving plasma is a little different than giving blood. Secondly, the US isn't doing it - companies within the US are doing it. The only role the US is playing here is that it refrains from making it illegal.
"God wasn't the creator" is not a presupposition. It's the default hypothesis until evidence sways us otherwise. NOT believing a theory yet is the default, and in the case for God, the ones who say "yes, god exists" are the ones that have taken on 100% of the burden of proof.
Just because a bit of information doesn't answer ONE particular question doesn't mean it's irrelevant. If life came to earth from a meteor hit, that would have many relevant repercussions, including:
1 - We would know it's a waste of time to try to figure out how life began in the universe in general by looking at the evidence available here on Earth.
2 - We would know life on other worlds must exist, or at the very least, must have existed in the past.
Does someone out there know, for the purpose of understanding this article, what is the difference between:
1 - A cell which is called "organic".
and
2 - A cell which is called "inorganic".
From a purely scientific (philosophically materialist) standpoint, what is the difference between a small self contained replicating machine and a small self contained replicating organism?
The problem with this kind of study (and I'm also including the ones by IBM that favor Linux over Windows in this) is that there is no general case that you can model results for. All these studies assume too many specific things about the "typical workplace" and "typical server needs" and "typical staff" that are not universal, and then have the hubris to take their conclusion and make the bold public statement that it applies universally. TCO calculations are especially prone to this since TCO depends largely on the staff's ability and willingness to learn the technology, and that's not the same for every situation. For us at work, Windows would be more expensive than Linux simply because we don't like it, and thus would spend the minimum time necessary to learn how to make it work just barely for us.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to arrest because your car was used in a bank robbery."
"What? But I reported that car stolen a week ago."
"Yes, but it's still your fault."
"Huh??!"
"Well, if you hadn't chosen to drive it to a bad neighborhood and park it while you went into a store, the bank robbers wouldn't have been able to use it in the robbery."
"But that's preposterous! You can't say it's my fault!"
"Hey, you can be held responsible for laws you didn't break, if your actions caused laws to be broken later in ways you didn't control. Didn't you know that? At least according to this guy "lobsterGun" on slashdot."
Exactly. RTFM is only a useful comment if you also tell the user where to find the F'ing M.
Once again you belittle people to disagree with you, based on the haughty misconception that they're saying something stupider than they really are. If 'div' is the integer division operator, and '/' is only for floats, then if you change one of your int variables to a float or one of your floats to an int, you have to go find everywhere it is used and change the operator for, what is in my opinion no good reason.
Where is your alleged alternative to that that I'm allegedly not seeing? Or were you assuming I was saying something stupider?
Thought so.
Taking this back to the beginning, what I don't understand is why any programmer worth his pay woud be writing code that said x = (divide one by two) * y in the first place. The sane way to write it is x = y / 2, which not only doesn't have the "problem" you point out, but is quicker to execute (both because if x and y are ints it avoids floating point calculations, and because it has less operations), simpler to look at, and avoids any dependance on the language's order of operations which also improves readabilty. (Some languages take multiplication and division to be of equal precedence, some do not, so x = 1/2*y might end up meaning x="one over two Y" to some people's way of thinking. Granted that's only a problem for people who don't have a comfortable feel of the language yet, but then again so is the "problem" your sig brings up.)
That is a terrible solution. It makes more sense to say the type of the operands used determines which type of operation to do. If x and y are floats, what does x div y mean? floor(x/y) or floor(x)/floor(y)? They aren't the same thing.
Or does the language just punt and say it's a compile time error to use div on floats?
The DMCA also criminalizes the source code, or any abstract description of the algorithm in a human language like English. It makes it illegal to "blow the whistle" on a company that's lying about how good their encryption is, for example.
There is a difference between "the law is bad" and "the court thinks that the law is bad". I am in no way obligated to agree with the court in its decision, and so pointing out that Elcomsoft lost the court case in no way stops me from going off on what a terrible law it is, or that it violates free speech.
If you choose to do business in a country, your business actions in that country are subject to the laws of that country. So the instant Elcomsoft knowingly sold its first copy of the program to a US citizen, the DMCA had jurisdiction over that act. You are right the DMCA has no jurisdiction over Dmitry - he wasn't involved in sales, so he wasn't the one violating the DMCA by choosing to provide the product to US citizens. But the company itself is under the jursdiction.
The possible punishments are limited, though. At most the US can tell Elcomsoft it is not allowed to do business inside the US.
But that case would have been harder to prosecute. The DMCA pushers want to stay clear of the anti-free speech aspects of the bill for now until they get a few convictions under their belts using just the 'selling software that exploits the holes' part of the bill. Even tech-clueless people who otherwise support the trampling of fair-use rights would sympathise with Dimitri if he was branded a crimnal for merely giving a speech.
Your analogy doesn't hold. Opium is illegal in MANY countries. Dimitry's software was illegal ONLY IN THE USA, which is NOT where he wrote it, and the decision to sell the product to the USA was not his decision, and it's entirely possible he didn't even know about it.
The fact that THIS trial is not for Dimitry doesn't invalide what the poster said. A year and a half ago he *was* arrested because of his *employer's* decision to sell software he wrote in a foreign country where it was illegal. And that arrest is the reason he's forced to testify now in this trial. He had to agree to testify in order to be let go last year, even though he shouldn't ever have been arrested in the first place because the DMCA was violated not by him, but by other people in the company he had no control over - specifily the ones who decided to sell his software in the US.
And neither is Dimitry. It's the company he worked for that's on trial. Dimitry's role in this case is purely as a witness. When he agreed to testify, Dimitry got off the hook with regards to the case agaisnt him personally. And that *is* an improvement over the way things looked when he was first arrested. A year and a half ago, in addition to the normal injusticies of the DMCA, there was the fact that they were going after Dimitry when it was actually his employer that committed the violation without his input. The DMCA wasn't violated until his employer chose to sell his software in the US market. What Dimitry did was perfectly legal in Russia where he did it. It was his employer that decided to sell that software in a country where it was illegal to do so.