This is the one question who's answer determines whether this is a slimy, unethical practice that we should be getting pissed about, or whether it is perfectly legitimate and fair.
That question is: When the content provider pays the ISP money, does the ISP use the money to create additional connectivity to that content provider, or does it merely allocate a greater percentage of its existing connectivity to that content provider? That's the million dollar question here.
There's nothing wrong if the money is used to buy *additional* infrastructure, so that connections to other providers are still 100% as good as they used to be, and connections to the paying provider are, say, 150% as good as they used to be.
On the other hand, it's highly unethical if what they are doing is taking resources *away* from non-paying providers and allocating them to the paying providers, without actually building anything new. (So the network responsiveness of the non-paying providers is less than 100% of what it used to be.) I say this is unethical because they are essentially opening up an auction where providers pay money whose only purpose is to hinder their competitors. ("Better pay us more money or we'll take away more of the bandwith to your site and give it to your competitor's site.")
Paying money for new bandwith is great. But holding the existing bandwith up for ransom is evil.
If you are checking to see if your web server is running, just do: telnet [server] 80
Sure, that can tell you if your web server is up, but if it is down, it can't tell you much about why. Ping is handy because it is so dead-simple that it removes most issues of program error and application error and lets you test the network connection at a fairly low level. If port 80 is not responding, but Ping is, then you know not to waste your time looking at the network itself (except maybe the firewall). You know it's the web server software that isn't working.
What about the lower gravity? I don't know the math to calculate it, but how thick an atmosphere can you get on a world with only half a Gee of gravity? Won't it still be too thin to breathe?
Ever since fiddling with E-term I started thinking how nice it would be to have transluscent windows that are truly trsnsluscent (can *really* see what's under them, not just the background window image, but other windows too.) This looks pretty neat, but I wonder if it will ever be duplicated in Xfree or something like it.
But the problem with getting a killer game for Linux, is that if it's good enough, it will get ported to Windows anyway. So there isn't any way to make incentive for Windows users to leave Windows to get that game. I have no idea how the hedgemony of Windows can be pierced. The incentive is too strong to make your game work on Windows.
In the US, you can spew hate-speak at strangers, march in a white hood and burn a cross - and you're expressing your views. When Milosevicz goes on an 'ethnic cleansing spree', the US is up in arms, standing up for the underdog. Hypocricy, elevated to an art form.
While I'm not exactly proud of the US's actions in the former Yugoslavia, this rhetoric of yours is despicable. Since when is speaking racial hatreds on the same level as acting on them by killing people?. You can rest assured that if KKK members started going around the country today burning black people's houses and performing lynchings, the response would not be "oh well, that's life". Free speech is a protected right, but free action is not.
Microsoft implemented the only solution possible: prevent users from getting access to untrusted code in the first place.
Uhm - no. That was not the only solution. The best solution is to do what everyone else on the fscking planet does with e-mail - DON'T RUN EMBEDDED PROGRAMS AUTOMATICALLY - Duh. When I click on an e-mail with an attachment in anything other than Outlook, I get a link within the message that I can click on to try to get at the attachment. This lets me actually *READ* the message before deciding to run the possibly dangerous code contained inside. If this were the default in Outlook, the ILOVEYOU trojan would not have spread as fast. The idea of having the default setting be to automatically RUN PROGRAMS sent as e-mail when clicked is the dumbest thing ever. e-mail is not about running programs. It's about sending messages. You should be paranoid about anyone who felt the need to send a program rather than a document in an e-mail. And your e-mail reader should allow you to be that paranoid. And it should be that paranoid as the default setting, not some option that most people won't bother to find out about and change.
But in this case it was distributed in such a way that the existence of the license is not neccessarily obvious. Taking a self-extracting archive and extracting it with a tool like Winzip is something that you might have done anyway without even knowing the license is there. Someone could use this as thier defence. The company has to make a good effort to publicise the details of the license. You can't be held to a license that is buried away hidden somewhere you aren't likely to look. They have to be displayed prominently.
But the reason that looks weird is that "this" is not a sentence, and therefore shouldn't have a period. Use a comma, any you get:
"This", is my way, which IMO looks cleaner.
"This," is the standard way.
Had it been an entire sentence being quoted, then my way, there's a period in the quote for the quoted sentence, as well as a comma outside for including it in the enclosing sentence, like so:
My way: "I am hungry.", Bob said.
Std way: "I am hungry," Bob said. (Looks bad because it ends the sentence "I am hungry" with a comma, purely as an artifact of how it is included inside the enclosing quoter's sentence.
Some people have commented that it is terrible for Katz to have sympathy for the Columbine killers on this anniversery - cruel and heartless.
Well, just to remind you poeple, this is NOT about the killers. It's about the over-reaction of schools in the aftermath. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Columbine incident. After the incident, schools nationwide began the guilty-until-proven-innocent practice of profiling anyone geeky as a potential threat and murderer. It is that that is the problem. Sure, the Columbine killers were not very nice people, to say the least. No, their actions cannot be excused. But to assume that anyone geeky will turn into another Columbine killer is terribly arrogant, stupid, and draconian.
If I send an e-mail to a long-lost friend who wasn't expecting it, is that "unsolicited" e-mail?
If I'm tracing my family tree and send a message to someone whom I think might be a long-lost cousin, to help confirm my data, is that "unsolicited" e-mail, just because he wasn't expecting it?
The problem with this is that we all know what makes SPAM annoying, but it is hard to define it in terms lawyers can't wriggle out of. What makes SPAM annoying is not *just* that it is unsolicited, but that it is automated in a repetative fashion, and often bulky in size. This translates into a real cost in e-mail where a message costs the recipient more than the sender. (The sender is just paying for some CPU cycles, while the recipient is paying to CPU cycles *and* secondary storage to hold the spam until it is read. This is a problem when your ISP has a limit on mailbox size.) AND also, it lies about pretending to know you, "Hello, friend, I thought you might be interested in this offer..."
I don't want to live in a world where I have to worry that I might get sued every time I send a singular, manually created message to a person who wasn't expecting it. The automated, repetative nature of SPAM is what makes it anoying, not just that it was unsolicited.
E-mail would be useless if nobody was allowed to send the first message. (The first message in any conversation must be an unsolicited one.)
You don't get it. It's the money, not the message.
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 1
This movie probably won't have a lot of Scientology, if any, in it. The books were mostly a sci-fi series that had nothing to do with L. Ron's little joke cult. People's urge to boycott the movie is not a matter of censorship, but one of consumers voting with their wallet. When you buy a ticket to this movie, you are giving money to Scientology (the cult is one of the financers of the movie). THAT is the problem. I have no idea if the movie will be enjoyable or not, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I will not give my money to Scientology.
The Word grammer checker is annoying for American English users too. It keeps complaining about perfectly ordinary constructs being "too hard". (It's frustrating trying to write a technical document when it keeps complaining about the passive voice.) (It certainly doesn't help that the American Standard English rules are sometimes blatantly illogical in the first place, especially in the use of quotation marks. It feels very wrong to put the end-of-sentence mark ('.','!', or '?') inside the quotes in cases where it isn't really a part of what was being said by the person being quoted. i.e.: Did Bob say, "hello?" (What Bob said is not a question, so why put the question mark inside the quotes? It IMO belongs outside, as part of the sentence into which his quote is being inserted.)
Sure, France has 60 Megapeople, but they are more tightly packed than in the US. It's 60 Megapeople spread out over an area that is similar in size to only two or three typical US states. Some areas of the US have a population density like that, such as the coast from Boston through New York, but it isn't common. High population density makes utilities cheaper per person. And France is one of the more "rural" parts of Europe. The other countries are even more dense (except for in Scandanavia).
Sure, you can get a good hookup in a "remote" location up in the mountains, but just how "remote" is that, really? How many kilometers away is the nearest sizable city (population over 100,000). How far away is the nearest major city over 1 million?
Actually, the problem is quite the opposite, with respect to socialism and profits. The US telcos are under regulations that force them to price everyone's access the same, no matter how rural. (The same is true for utilities like electricity.)
The thing is, the US has a lot more "rural" areas than Europe does, and so this problem of having to support the rural areas even though it is not profitable is actually worse in the US than in Europe. In practice, what ends up happening is that the urban utility costs are a bit higher than they would otherwise need to be, in order to subsidise the rural areas that are operating at a loss. It's expensive to provide service when there's only about 1 house per 20 telephone poles.
That's also one of the main reasons US network technology is a bit behind the times. It's terribly expensive to replace all those old wires with something better.
It's the same story with public transportation. many Europeans chide the US for having an almost non-existant public transit system, but they forget that our cities aren't as dense. In the few places where they are, such as New York, there is quite a bit more public transit than in the rest of the country, and people prefer not to drive themselves. But it is very inefficient to run busses or trains out to suburbs for commuters unless they are all going to the same place (which of course, they aren't).
Quite a few years back, I had participated in the undergraduate version of this, just at the regional level (didn't make it to the world finals). I remember getting really mad over faulty information in the givens for one of the problems. It caused us to fail our solution several times over, and since they aren't allowed to tell you anything other than "wrong result", we couldn't tell what was wrong.
Part of the problem involved having to find the value of N!, where N could get up to a max size of M (I can't remember the exact numbers anymore). You were supposed to tally how many times each digit appeared (assuming it is represented in decimal) in the resulting number. The point was that the good programmer should immediately recognize that there was no way to solve this problem using the built-in binary numbers on any computer, since it required that you store long numbers with perfect accuracy (so floats are out too). So the point was to quickly whip up a string-ized number format, and implement a multiplication routine for it so you could do large factorials. Pretty simple and routine once you realize that you will have to do this, right?
Well, it *should* have been simple, and it *would* have been if it weren't for the fact that the problem's givens lied to us about how many digits were in M! (It was given that M! would be the largest value in the test data, and that it contains no more than XXX digits.). They said too few digits, and as such our array was too small to hold the result. Our algorithm was actually correct, excepting this one mistake, within 10 minutes of the contest's start. And the rules of the contest prevented us from getting any clarification about what was failing in our test submissions, and there is no way to quickly check if the givens were correct, since you can't calculate what M! is in reasonable time when M is big. (Not without a program - which is what we were making). Besides, since they were givens, we shouldn't have *had* to check them. I was in a funk for a week after that because it wasted too much of our limited time and we had it *right* dammit, from the first 10 minutes. The mistake in the givens didn't get publicised until after the contest was almost over, and we'd already squandered away our time on this one problem that we knew we were this close to finishing.
That was a long time ago, but it still irks me. That one mistake kept us from going on to the next level of the contest. If that given had been correct, then our first submission, 10 minutes into the contest, would have given us enough total points to go on to the next level. (It was one of those years in which even the best finishers only got 2 of the problems right.)
It's because they aren't filtering based on the trust of some third-party application that everyone already knows filters unfairly. The problem with censorware in general is the starting premise that it is even *possible* to filter fairly using an automated system.
Unless you've found some new software that is smart enough to pass the Turing Test, you can't get it to understand the meaning of a page, and so you can't filter fairly. You will inevitably end up filtering out stuff that is legit, or letting through stuff that isn't.
Now, what makes this case different is that he mentioned that the 'censoring', such as it is, is done by the HUMAN teachers simply being there to supervise, and NOT by automated dumbass filters.
Where I grew up, in Milwaukee, there was a "religion" section, but it was purely informational and had no sermons at all. It was little more than a classified ad section for churches, where they would list times & places of gatherings. There was usually one or two articles about what churches were doing or what people in churches were doing, but no actuall preachy sermons. There might be an article about a new church being built, or a new archbishop being selected, but that was it.
Islam and Christianity are mutually incompatible and have been around for at least 15000 years -
The reason such memes last is part of what memetics is all about - mutation. Memes survive by mutatuing to deal with changes in the environment. Since a meme is purely an idea, it can mutate very fast relative to a physical gene.
In your example here, the memes survived by mutating whenever necessary. This doesn't have to be deliberate, either. The memes that didn't mutate into something more tolerable died off leaving only the tolerant ones left. The meme that Popes are infallable, for example, has died out because to hold onto it would be too hard. (Obvious contradicitons like collaboration with Hitler, condemnation of Galileo, etc make it hard to pass the meme on to others. So it dies to be replaced by the slightly more reasonable meme that the Pope can make mistakes too, but is generally less likely too.)
You are wondering where all the 60's free-speech advocates went? Well, they are probably a part of the majority of Americans who aren't even aware of what's going on here. They aren't protesting because they are no better informed than anyone else is. They are getting the same 'meme' about this that everyone else is. And they are from a pre-computer generation where only a few of them will be aware of this issue.
1) People should get a rating based on the TIME they have been a Slashdot, not just this "karma". New members posts start at -1, no exceptions. After three months, they start at 0. After three more months, they start at 1. This means that if a troll wants to troll, he'll have to put in his dues for six months. If he then wants to blow it all on a single, grand, troll parade...fine. He can start all over.
Congratulations! You've just discovered a way to ensure that nobody new will ever bother becoming a regular Slashdot participant, and the only participants will be the current crop of people. Was this your intent? Nobody new is going to bother posting anything if they are handed this newbie discrimination by an automated system. No matter how insightful their post might be, a computer decides that it isn't worthwhile based purely on this artificial metric. This may have been your intent, but did you realize that this means they won't bother sticking around for the required year it takes to finally have a real voice?
> > Yeah, and baldness is just another hair color.
> That doesn't stand up. [..snip..] If you have no hair, you have no hair color
That was my point precisely. Saying not(X) = X is obviously trivially false. Saying "no belief = belief" is nothing more than an attempt to legitimize your belief by pretending everyone else is in the same boat too, when in fact they aren't.
Yes, everyone - myself included - has beliefs about lots of things. But in my case, God ain't one of 'em. Why is it so hard to accept that not everyone has a need to believe in the supernatural?
I think you misunderstood me. (Easy to do, now that I re-read my statement and see that it has two ambiguous interpetations.) The problem was my pronouns had ambiguous antecedents. When I said, "The assertion that there is no god is such a statement", the "such" was not referring to the "they are in fact false" part, as you seemed to believe. I was referring to the "not possible to disprove" part.
You can't search the whole universe to prove that something is nonexistant. The only things you can prove are nonexistant are:
Things that described in an internally inconsistant manner (a square with three sides, a god that is omniscient and allows us free will at the same time {If god is incapable of being mistaken about his predicitons of my future actions, then it is my inescapable fate to perform those actions.}), or
Things where the scope of the search is small - "there are no leprechauns in my closet" is easy to show, but "There are no leprechauns in the tri-county area" is hard to prove, and "there are no leprechauns in the universe" is impossible to prove.
In your quoting of me you forgot to embolden the very important phrase "even if".
Slashdot Mirror
That question is: When the content provider pays the ISP money, does the ISP use the money to create additional connectivity to that content provider, or does it merely allocate a greater percentage of its existing connectivity to that content provider? That's the million dollar question here.
There's nothing wrong if the money is used to buy *additional* infrastructure, so that connections to other providers are still 100% as good as they used to be, and connections to the paying provider are, say, 150% as good as they used to be.
On the other hand, it's highly unethical if what they are doing is taking resources *away* from non-paying providers and allocating them to the paying providers, without actually building anything new. (So the network responsiveness of the non-paying providers is less than 100% of what it used to be.) I say this is unethical because they are essentially opening up an auction where providers pay money whose only purpose is to hinder their competitors. ("Better pay us more money or we'll take away more of the bandwith to your site and give it to your competitor's site.")
Paying money for new bandwith is great. But holding the existing bandwith up for ransom is evil.
Sure, that can tell you if your web server is up, but if it is down, it can't tell you much about why. Ping is handy because it is so dead-simple that it removes most issues of program error and application error and lets you test the network connection at a fairly low level. If port 80 is not responding, but Ping is, then you know not to waste your time looking at the network itself (except maybe the firewall). You know it's the web server software that isn't working.
What about the lower gravity? I don't know the math to calculate it, but how thick an atmosphere can you get on a world with only half a Gee of gravity? Won't it still be too thin to breathe?
Ever since fiddling with E-term I started thinking how nice it would be to have transluscent windows that are truly trsnsluscent (can *really* see what's under them, not just the background window image, but other windows too.) This looks pretty neat, but I wonder if it will ever be duplicated in Xfree or something like it.
But the problem with getting a killer game for Linux, is that if it's good enough, it will get ported to Windows anyway. So there isn't any way to make incentive for Windows users to leave Windows to get that game. I have no idea how the hedgemony of Windows can be pierced. The incentive is too strong to make your game work on Windows.
- In the US, you can spew hate-speak at strangers, march in a white hood and burn a cross - and you're expressing your views. When Milosevicz goes on an 'ethnic cleansing spree', the US is up in arms, standing up for the underdog. Hypocricy, elevated to an art form.
While I'm not exactly proud of the US's actions in the former Yugoslavia, this rhetoric of yours is despicable. Since when is speaking racial hatreds on the same level as acting on them by killing people?.You can rest assured that if KKK members started going around the country today burning black people's houses and performing lynchings, the response would not be "oh well, that's life". Free speech is a protected right, but free action is not.
Ever heard of "sperm"?
Women are not self-replicating.
- Microsoft implemented the only solution possible: prevent users from getting access to untrusted code in the first place.
Uhm - no. That was not the only solution. The best solution is to do what everyone else on the fscking planet does with e-mail - DON'T RUN EMBEDDED PROGRAMS AUTOMATICALLY - Duh. When I click on an e-mail with an attachment in anything other than Outlook, I get a link within the message that I can click on to try to get at the attachment. This lets me actually *READ* the message before deciding to run the possibly dangerous code contained inside. If this were the default in Outlook, the ILOVEYOU trojan would not have spread as fast. The idea of having the default setting be to automatically RUN PROGRAMS sent as e-mail when clicked is the dumbest thing ever. e-mail is not about running programs. It's about sending messages. You should be paranoid about anyone who felt the need to send a program rather than a document in an e-mail. And your e-mail reader should allow you to be that paranoid. And it should be that paranoid as the default setting, not some option that most people won't bother to find out about and change.But in this case it was distributed in such a way that the existence of the license is not neccessarily obvious. Taking a self-extracting archive and extracting it with a tool like Winzip is something that you might have done anyway without even knowing the license is there. Someone could use this as thier defence. The company has to make a good effort to publicise the details of the license. You can't be held to a license that is buried away hidden somewhere you aren't likely to look. They have to be displayed prominently.
"This". looks weird.
But the reason that looks weird is that "this" is not a sentence, and therefore shouldn't have a period. Use a comma, any you get:
Had it been an entire sentence being quoted, then my way, there's a period in the quote for the quoted sentence, as well as a comma outside for including it in the enclosing sentence, like so:
Some people have commented that it is terrible for Katz to have sympathy for the Columbine killers on this anniversery - cruel and heartless.
Well, just to remind you poeple, this is NOT about the killers. It's about the over-reaction of schools in the aftermath. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Columbine incident. After the incident, schools nationwide began the guilty-until-proven-innocent practice of profiling anyone geeky as a potential threat and murderer. It is that that is the problem. Sure, the Columbine killers were not very nice people, to say the least. No, their actions cannot be excused. But to assume that anyone geeky will turn into another Columbine killer is terribly arrogant, stupid, and draconian.
Sure, public messages such as those posted here are fair game for quoting, but that quoting must attribute the author. Otherwise it's plagerism.
If I send an e-mail to a long-lost friend who wasn't expecting it, is that "unsolicited" e-mail?
If I'm tracing my family tree and send a message to someone whom I think might be a long-lost cousin, to help confirm my data, is that "unsolicited" e-mail, just because he wasn't expecting it?
The problem with this is that we all know what makes SPAM annoying, but it is hard to define it in terms lawyers can't wriggle out of. What makes SPAM annoying is not *just* that it is unsolicited, but that it is automated in a repetative fashion, and often bulky in size. This translates into a real cost in e-mail where a message costs the recipient more than the sender. (The sender is just paying for some CPU cycles, while the recipient is paying to CPU cycles *and* secondary storage to hold the spam until it is read. This is a problem when your ISP has a limit on mailbox size.) AND also, it lies about pretending to know you, "Hello, friend, I thought you might be interested in this offer..."
I don't want to live in a world where I have to worry that I might get sued every time I send a singular, manually created message to a person who wasn't expecting it. The automated, repetative nature of SPAM is what makes it anoying, not just that it was unsolicited.
E-mail would be useless if nobody was allowed to send the first message. (The first message in any conversation must be an unsolicited one.)
This movie probably won't have a lot of Scientology, if any, in it. The books were mostly a sci-fi series that had nothing to do with L. Ron's little joke cult. People's urge to boycott the movie is not a matter of censorship, but one of consumers voting with their wallet. When you buy a ticket to this movie, you are giving money to Scientology (the cult is one of the financers of the movie). THAT is the problem. I have no idea if the movie will be enjoyable or not, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I will not give my money to Scientology.
The Word grammer checker is annoying for American English users too. It keeps complaining about perfectly ordinary constructs being "too hard". (It's frustrating trying to write a technical document when it keeps complaining about the passive voice.) (It certainly doesn't help that the American Standard English rules are sometimes blatantly illogical in the first place, especially in the use of quotation marks. It feels very wrong to put the end-of-sentence mark ('.','!', or '?') inside the quotes in cases where it isn't really a part of what was being said by the person being quoted. i.e.: Did Bob say, "hello?" (What Bob said is not a question, so why put the question mark inside the quotes? It IMO belongs outside, as part of the sentence into which his quote is being inserted.)
Sure, you can get a good hookup in a "remote" location up in the mountains, but just how "remote" is that, really? How many kilometers away is the nearest sizable city (population over 100,000). How far away is the nearest major city over 1 million?
The thing is, the US has a lot more "rural" areas than Europe does, and so this problem of having to support the rural areas even though it is not profitable is actually worse in the US than in Europe. In practice, what ends up happening is that the urban utility costs are a bit higher than they would otherwise need to be, in order to subsidise the rural areas that are operating at a loss. It's expensive to provide service when there's only about 1 house per 20 telephone poles.
That's also one of the main reasons US network technology is a bit behind the times. It's terribly expensive to replace all those old wires with something better.
It's the same story with public transportation. many Europeans chide the US for having an almost non-existant public transit system, but they forget that our cities aren't as dense. In the few places where they are, such as New York, there is quite a bit more public transit than in the rest of the country, and people prefer not to drive themselves. But it is very inefficient to run busses or trains out to suburbs for commuters unless they are all going to the same place (which of course, they aren't).
Part of the problem involved having to find the value of N!, where N could get up to a max size of M (I can't remember the exact numbers anymore). You were supposed to tally how many times each digit appeared (assuming it is represented in decimal) in the resulting number. The point was that the good programmer should immediately recognize that there was no way to solve this problem using the built-in binary numbers on any computer, since it required that you store long numbers with perfect accuracy (so floats are out too). So the point was to quickly whip up a string-ized number format, and implement a multiplication routine for it so you could do large factorials. Pretty simple and routine once you realize that you will have to do this, right?
Well, it *should* have been simple, and it *would* have been if it weren't for the fact that the problem's givens lied to us about how many digits were in M! (It was given that M! would be the largest value in the test data, and that it contains no more than XXX digits.). They said too few digits, and as such our array was too small to hold the result. Our algorithm was actually correct, excepting this one mistake, within 10 minutes of the contest's start. And the rules of the contest prevented us from getting any clarification about what was failing in our test submissions, and there is no way to quickly check if the givens were correct, since you can't calculate what M! is in reasonable time when M is big. (Not without a program - which is what we were making). Besides, since they were givens, we shouldn't have *had* to check them. I was in a funk for a week after that because it wasted too much of our limited time and we had it *right* dammit, from the first 10 minutes. The mistake in the givens didn't get publicised until after the contest was almost over, and we'd already squandered away our time on this one problem that we knew we were this close to finishing.
That was a long time ago, but it still irks me. That one mistake kept us from going on to the next level of the contest. If that given had been correct, then our first submission, 10 minutes into the contest, would have given us enough total points to go on to the next level. (It was one of those years in which even the best finishers only got 2 of the problems right.)
Unless you've found some new software that is smart enough to pass the Turing Test, you can't get it to understand the meaning of a page, and so you can't filter fairly. You will inevitably end up filtering out stuff that is legit, or letting through stuff that isn't.
Now, what makes this case different is that he mentioned that the 'censoring', such as it is, is done by the HUMAN teachers simply being there to supervise, and NOT by automated dumbass filters.
That is why you haven't seen protest about it.
Where I grew up, in Milwaukee, there was a "religion" section, but it was purely informational and had no sermons at all. It was little more than a classified ad section for churches, where they would list times & places of gatherings. There was usually one or two articles about what churches were doing or what people in churches were doing, but no actuall preachy sermons. There might be an article about a new church being built, or a new archbishop being selected, but that was it.
The reason such memes last is part of what memetics is all about - mutation. Memes survive by mutatuing to deal with changes in the environment. Since a meme is purely an idea, it can mutate very fast relative to a physical gene.
In your example here, the memes survived by mutating whenever necessary. This doesn't have to be deliberate, either. The memes that didn't mutate into something more tolerable died off leaving only the tolerant ones left. The meme that Popes are infallable, for example, has died out because to hold onto it would be too hard. (Obvious contradicitons like collaboration with Hitler, condemnation of Galileo, etc make it hard to pass the meme on to others. So it dies to be replaced by the slightly more reasonable meme that the Pope can make mistakes too, but is generally less likely too.)
You are wondering where all the 60's free-speech advocates went? Well, they are probably a part of the majority of Americans who aren't even aware of what's going on here. They aren't protesting because they are no better informed than anyone else is. They are getting the same 'meme' about this that everyone else is. And they are from a pre-computer generation where only a few of them will be aware of this issue.
Congratulations! You've just discovered a way to ensure that nobody new will ever bother becoming a regular Slashdot participant, and the only participants will be the current crop of people. Was this your intent? Nobody new is going to bother posting anything if they are handed this newbie discrimination by an automated system. No matter how insightful their post might be, a computer decides that it isn't worthwhile based purely on this artificial metric. This may have been your intent, but did you realize that this means they won't bother sticking around for the required year it takes to finally have a real voice?
> That doesn't stand up. [..snip..] If you have no hair, you have no hair color
That was my point precisely. Saying not(X) = X is obviously trivially false. Saying "no belief = belief" is nothing more than an attempt to legitimize your belief by pretending everyone else is in the same boat too, when in fact they aren't.
Yes, everyone - myself included - has beliefs about lots of things. But in my case, God ain't one of 'em. Why is it so hard to accept that not everyone has a need to believe in the supernatural?
I think you misunderstood me. (Easy to do, now that I re-read my statement and see that it has two ambiguous interpetations.) The problem was my pronouns had ambiguous antecedents. When I said, "The assertion that there is no god is such a statement", the "such" was not referring to the "they are in fact false" part, as you seemed to believe. I was referring to the "not possible to disprove" part.
You can't search the whole universe to prove that something is nonexistant. The only things you can prove are nonexistant are:
In your quoting of me you forgot to embolden the very important phrase "even if".