You mention that abolitionists backed up their position with the bible (which is true), but fail to mention that pro-slavery people did too.
Then as now, people use religion to convince them that their political views are right. This is both good and bad at the same time. Religion is a political tool, face it. At least the writers of the constitution were trying to do something to change that (they weren't very successful, though).
Just as religion can currupt politics, politics can corrupt religion. Those guys knew that. They'd seen enough of it in Europe and they wanted no part of it. The first amendment was as much to protect religion as it was to protect politics.
My point? You don't have to be an atheist to want separation of church and state. It's in the best interests of the religious as well to keep them apart. They don't have separation of church and state in most of Europe and the atheism rate there is much higher. Why? Government mandated religion tends to make more people dislike religion.
Keep 'em separate. Its in the best interests of both theists like you and atheists like me.
Now, as far as this censorship goes, I'm just as much against censoring the bible as a Christian would be. After all, reading the bible yourself is a good way to scare you into becoming an atheist. That propagandistic trash is one scary manifesto.
The real problem in this case was not deliberate censorship, but the laziness to assume that a piece of pattern-recognition software could accurately filter info about certain topics. It doesn't work that well. Think "AOL" and "TOS". Doctors talking about breast cancer are not being pronographic, yet dumb censorship software can't tell the difference between that and, "Naked breasts R' us!" - type sites.
Let me get this straight here...
on
Wired on Kipling
·
· Score: 1
Okay, let's see. Someone misuses the work hacker to mean cracker and we want to show them that they are wrong and hackers are not typically crackers. Then we decide to get revenge by attempting to crack their site. Helloooo, McFly!! Look up "irony" in the dictionary.
Like it or not, Satan is a part of the Christian mythos, not the pagan mythos. Either yor girlfriend was confused and mislabelled herself, or you were confused and mislabelled her. Either way, pagans and Satanists are different things.
And before you ask, no, I'm not either one. I'm just an outside observer to the whole religion thing (agnostic/atheist) and find the mislabelling rather disgusting, like mislabelling hackers.
Phonetically reading unknown words and then *later* matching those sounds up to vocabulary you learn after-the-fact can't work, because English has too many damn ambiguous pronounciations such that you end up having to just memorize every word. (The classic "ghoti = fish" example).
If I learned to pronounce "system" as sigh-stem by looking at the spelling (which is perfectly valid given the rules of the letters that make it up), I would have a hard time recognizing later on that that is the same word as sis-tem.
The problem is that this system would lead to a snowballing effect where the poor can't get out of poverty even with a lot of effort. We already see this effect with schools. Schools are paid for by local property taxes, so if the locals are poor, own bad land (if any at all), then their schools get very little money, which in turn makes the next generation even more likely to be poor (with the crappy education they had, high paying careers are not likely).
One thing Republicans and Libertarians forget is that only some unemployment is caused by laziness. A certain percentage of unemployment is a necessary component of capitalism. (If there is no unemployment, then there is no pool of people looking for work, thus business can't hire anyone. There always need to be a small percentage of potential workers 'in reserve'.)
(No, I'm no Democrat in case you're wondering. I'm just someone who's sick and tired of the unthinking rhetoric that every single political party spews forth every day.)
The reason it is impossible to not have a government is that government is such a generic term that any sort of organization of any kind that makes rules over people is a government.
The only way to not have a government is to have anarchy. Anarchy is not a permanent condition. (Things don't remain in anarchy for long - a government always forms up in one form or another. Even a local bully pushing people around counts as a government, albiet a small one.)
It has "savage love" in it. (Not exactly my favorite part. I never bother reading it, but the column is there every issue.)
Perhaps the paper distribution is different in every city?
I've heard rumors that some network TV execs were in Madison recently courting the Onion writers to see if they'd be interested in writing for a fake-news TV series. Can anyone confirm this?
Yes, I admit it, I saw it too. This movie was going nowhere (opening weekend, theatre had like a total of 9 people in it). We MST3Ked it, which made almost tolerable, but not really.
A list of some of the lamest parts of the movie, IMO, for those who haven't seen it (let these be a warning to you):
They loaded torpedos into the launch tubes by hand! like some WW2 movie. What, did something horrible happen in the future that made everyone forget the auto-loading technology that we already have today?
The fighter ships looked like cut-off prop fighter-planes, with the circle of guns looking surprisingly like a rotary prop engine. I don't recall them looking that bad in the video game.
Cliche, Cliche, Cliche! The hangar on the flight deck had the standard assortment of guys in helmets running around guiding the fighters to their takeoff points (I expected to see some guy come out with paddles to direct the planes). fighters came in to the hanger with lots of sparks and grinding - even on the successful 'normal' landings.
Cliche, Cliche, Cliche! Every standard military flyboy-movie thing was found, but done very badly - the new guy trying to prove himself to his squadron, starting off on a bad foot. The lunatic pilot who starts out uncontrolled and crazy until his antics get someone hurt and then he 'sobers up'. The hard-nosed-commander-who-softens-up-later. The I-can-break-my-order-but-you-cant senior officer, etc. The list goes on.
This has got to be the worst: The ship is silent, hiding on an asteroid. An enemy vessel slowly passes overhead. The captain tells everyone to be on the lookout, and they all look up at the ceiling! (Which has no windows or anything.)
Don't see the movie. It blows. If you are one of these insane people who is willing to pay money just for the SW trailer, wait to see it on some other movie. (I went in expecting Wing Commander to be an okay movie. That's 2 hours of my life I'm never getting back.)
Libertarians are nuts. Government can be evil, but government is a *nessacery* evil. Lasse-faire is impossible, because in the case of natural monopolies, some corporation would have exclusive control instead of a government - it would be even worse. You will always be governed, like it or not. It's just a question of whether it will be by the State or by private thugs. Private ownership of *everything* is insane. I do not want to pay a fscking toll on every single road, and have thousands of phone companies trying to lay their own cables all over the place, never being forced to lease them to each other (as the current regulations dictate), so that there are wires everywhere across the country. And I sure as hell don't want to see a private police force. Some libertarians are okay, but just like the big-2 parties, the moderate ones are the ones that are okay, and the pureists are the ones that are dangerous.
Sales Tax no different than physical stores, but..
on
Internet Taxes Likely
·
· Score: 1
If it were just a very simple law that said, "Sales over the internet shall be governed by the same tax laws as sales by phone or snail-mail.", then I'd not object. Then they'd be treating the 'net the same as any other medium.
What pisses me off is when they assume the 'net somehow deserves stricter or heaver laws than the real-life world. That's quite a luddite attitude. It's the same as the crap they pulled (are pulling) with the CDA 1 and 2. - Something shouldn't be *more* illegal just becasue the internet was involved.
I first saw this in the paper version of the Onion a year ago when I used to pick up a copy religiously every week on State St in Madison. This is not new stuff.
This isn't a site of "olds for nerds", it's "news for nerds", as in "new".
Otherwise, I agree, it was funny when it first came out.
I'm shelling out the cash to buy this puppy as soon as I see it on the shelves. Spending time with the turn-based strategy of Civ was a great way to pass the time while waiting for phone calls and such but it always bothered me that I had to have Windows up to run it.
Now I can alternate between programming inspirations on Linux and CivIII on Linux without a reboot. Plus the publicity of having a major first-run shrinkwrap game on linux at the same time as Windows is going to really help. Never underestimate the power of shelf space at Best Buy for publicity.
One worry though: it said a network card was listed as 'required hardware' for network play. Why doesn't it work over PPP, I wonder?
Only 2 senatars voted against the CDA (version 1), one of them a democrat, and one a republican. (I know the democrat was Russ Fiengold from WI, because that's my home state, but I don't remember who the Republican was.)
This is not a party vs party issue. It's a common-sense vs. politician issue.
Contrary to popular misconception, slander is not simply saying something bad about someone. Slander is saying something bad about someone when you know it to be false.
If I tell the world you are a pedophile, and it turns out you actually are a pedophile, then I am not guilty of slander. However, if I was lying, then I'm guilty.
Before you morons spout off about how bad of an idea that is, try to think about how much power big money would have if there weren't slander laws. For example, if it were legal for Microsoft to start an ad campaign saying Linux will destroy files randomly and crash every 10 minutes and sacrifice your firstborn to Zirkon the space goddess, you know they'd have no qualms about doing it.
FUD is pretty bad, but it would be even worse were it not for the slander law. With the slander law, they have to be very careful to not say anything which is directly false - their lies are restricted to half-truths and connotative ambiguities that can't be technically proven false.
Encourages evil one-user-per-computer assumption.
on
Windows ID
·
· Score: 1
My main objection to this claptrap (from both MS and Intel) is the fact that it is built on the assumption that there is only one user per computer. If someone uses the same computer I do, I don't want his ID and his log trail attached to me.
This kind of assumption might be defensible if MS were to finally come out and admit that its Windows crap isn't really multiuser at all. It's assumptions like this on their part that run contrary to their claim to be 'mutli-user'. (With Intel's PIII ID it's even more annoying than the Windows ID, because putting the ID the CPU starts to affect real multiuser systems like Linux too.)
Don't let them spread the myth that workstations must be single-user. Letting that myth take root will kill one of the things that makes Unix better than the rest.
Just because it isn't common in English doesn't mean you can't strip the vowels when pronouncing something. I pronounce "SQL" as "sql". When I feel the need to put in vowels I say "squirrel", but that's not often.
Look, you gun lunatics - the point was that the chief reason given for owning guns, that they can pretect you from gummint men, is proven wrong time and time again.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a totally separate issue. Whether or not the gummint was in the wrong at Waco or Ruby Ridge is irreveant to the point. The guns didn't give the Davidians the ability to fend off the gummint, and they didn't give the Weaver's the ability to either.
No matter what you've got in your gun rack, the gummint's got bigger stuff like tanks and missles, and so on. Regardles of if this is morally wrong, it happens to be true. Your guns are not going to defend you against the government unless there are a hell of a lot of you banded together - in which case you don't need the guns and passive resistance will work too (and make it easier to take the moral high ground).
Why don't you guys admit the truth - that you aren't stockpiling guns to fight the government - you are doing it to fight other ordinary citizens that you don't like.
Alright, one more time: Sun was not suing MS because they made changes, but because they made changes in such a way that the programmer could no longer identify the portable from the proprietary.
According to the rules, every class that is part of the official portable cross-platform Java spec goes into the java.* heirarchy (java.lang, java.util, java.awt, etc...). Anything that is not portable goes outside the java.* heirarchy, for example, "mystuff.whatever.classA", or perhaps something like "win32.some.proprietary.exra".
The idea is that then, unlike in most other languages, the programmer doesn't need to rely on some big manual to figure out what is and isn't portable - the programmer just knows from the name of the class in the hierarchy if it is proprietary or not.
That's what MS ruined, by adding Win32-specific extras to the java.* hierarchy instead of as separate classes. And that's what Sun's complaint is about.
Under the new license, people could grab sun's source and make their own versions of the classes, but they'd better not install them into java.* like MS tried to do - put them somewhere else.
I've missed many shows, having lived where I can only see the 'distilled' versions on network TV (I want them to release the whole series on video, dammit!). Anyway, of the one's I've seen, my faves are:
Mitchel: singing"Shoots guy's just to put 'em in jail, Mitchell..."
Mitchel: "Hey look, the police station is in a motel."
Manhunt in Space: I'll find that Rocket! "Yah, even if I have to search all three pads."
Manos: "Ohh, it's the haunting Torgo theme."
Manos: "Meanwhile, in a completely different movie..."
Hercules (I forget which one of them): Scene - end of a storm, the clouds part to the side, a heavenly chorus singing "aaaahhhh-aaahhh-ahhhh", MSTers sing, "The Simp..sons"
They are also refusing to connect the customer at all unless they have the approved configuration. That is very unfair. Not every customer is a technophobe-cant-program-your-VCR moron who needs hand-holding to install this. They are denying access to those who could hook it up themselves. That's dumb. It's like selling a car with the hood nailed shut.
1 - Crappy memory protection: One app stepping on the memory of another so that when you get a 'bomb', you have no idea which app is *really* the one responsible. The one reported is not necessarily the culplrit, since it can be screwing up merely because another app stepped on *it*.
2 - Crappy Multitasking: Apps that have to be written to be 'polite' and abdicate CPU time to each other to get it to work. This is in programmer-land and not OS-land that this is done.
3 - Vendor lock-in. What Microsoft is to opensource, Apple is to openhardware.
Don't get me wrong, Apple is fine for desktop stuff, but desktop stuff isn't where the really 'hard' problems in OS design live. Server stuff is the hard part. (So, in other words, saying that Apple is a good desktop machine isn't saying much for the OS.)
And I fully agree that what Bell Atlantic is doing is wrong. I side with Mac users on this one. An enemy of my enemy is my friend. (The enemy in this case being idiotic closed vendor lock-in for no real technical reason.) I just take exception to your claim that *all* the bad stuff said about Apple is FUD. Apple does have some real technical problems with its OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Then as now, people use religion to convince them that their political views are right. This is both good and bad at the same time. Religion is a political tool, face it. At least the writers of the constitution were trying to do something to change that (they weren't very successful, though).
Just as religion can currupt politics, politics can corrupt religion. Those guys knew that. They'd seen enough of it in Europe and they wanted no part of it. The first amendment was as much to protect religion as it was to protect politics.
My point? You don't have to be an atheist to want separation of church and state. It's in the best interests of the religious as well to keep them apart. They don't have separation of church and state in most of Europe and the atheism rate there is much higher. Why? Government mandated religion tends to make more people dislike religion.
Keep 'em separate. Its in the best interests of both theists like you and atheists like me.
Now, as far as this censorship goes, I'm just as much against censoring the bible as a Christian would be. After all, reading the bible yourself is a good way to scare you into becoming an atheist. That propagandistic trash is one scary manifesto.
The real problem in this case was not deliberate censorship, but the laziness to assume that a piece of pattern-recognition software could accurately filter info about certain topics. It doesn't work that well. Think "AOL" and "TOS". Doctors talking about breast cancer are not being pronographic, yet dumb censorship software can't tell the difference between that and, "Naked breasts R' us!" - type sites.
Okay, let's see. Someone misuses the work hacker to mean cracker and we want to show them that they are wrong and hackers are not typically crackers. Then we decide to get revenge by attempting to crack their site. Helloooo, McFly!! Look up "irony" in the dictionary.
And before you ask, no, I'm not either one. I'm just an outside observer to the whole religion thing (agnostic/atheist) and find the mislabelling rather disgusting, like mislabelling hackers.
If I learned to pronounce "system" as sigh-stem by looking at the spelling (which is perfectly valid given the rules of the letters that make it up), I would have a hard time recognizing later on that that is the same word as sis-tem.
Bull. What he said was that Bill's money was obtained through luck, not that money in general is obtained through luck.
You'd make a good politician with your talent for twisting words. I hope you're proud.
One thing Republicans and Libertarians forget is that only some unemployment is caused by laziness. A certain percentage of unemployment is a necessary component of capitalism. (If there is no unemployment, then there is no pool of people looking for work, thus business can't hire anyone. There always need to be a small percentage of potential workers 'in reserve'.)
(No, I'm no Democrat in case you're wondering. I'm just someone who's sick and tired of the unthinking rhetoric that every single political party spews forth every day.)
The only way to not have a government is to have anarchy. Anarchy is not a permanent condition. (Things don't remain in anarchy for long - a government always forms up in one form or another. Even a local bully pushing people around counts as a government, albiet a small one.)
It has "savage love" in it. (Not exactly my favorite part. I never bother reading it, but the column is there every issue.)
Perhaps the paper distribution is different in every city?
I've heard rumors that some network TV execs were in Madison recently courting the Onion writers to see if they'd be interested in writing for a fake-news TV series. Can anyone confirm this?
There is a need to restrict things to just new stuff because there is a huge load of cool old stuff - too much to cover.
A list of some of the lamest parts of the movie, IMO, for those who haven't seen it (let these be a warning to you):
- They loaded torpedos into the launch tubes by hand! like some WW2 movie. What, did something horrible happen in the future that made everyone forget the auto-loading technology that we already have today?
- The fighter ships looked like cut-off prop fighter-planes, with the circle of guns looking surprisingly like a rotary prop engine. I don't recall them looking that bad in the video game.
- Cliche, Cliche, Cliche! The hangar on the flight deck had the standard assortment of guys in helmets running around guiding the fighters to their takeoff points (I expected to see some guy come out with paddles to direct the planes). fighters came in to the hanger with lots of sparks and grinding - even on the successful 'normal' landings.
- Cliche, Cliche, Cliche! Every standard military flyboy-movie thing was found, but done very badly - the new guy trying to prove himself to his squadron, starting off on a bad foot. The lunatic pilot who starts out uncontrolled and crazy until his antics get someone hurt and then he 'sobers up'. The hard-nosed-commander-who-softens-up-later. The I-can-break-my-order-but-you-cant senior officer, etc. The list goes on.
- This has got to be the worst: The ship is silent, hiding on an asteroid. An enemy vessel slowly passes overhead. The captain tells everyone to be on the lookout, and they all look up at the ceiling! (Which has no windows or anything.)
Don't see the movie. It blows. If you are one of these insane people who is willing to pay money just for the SW trailer, wait to see it on some other movie. (I went in expecting Wing Commander to be an okay movie. That's 2 hours of my life I'm never getting back.)Libertarians are nuts. Government can be evil, but government is a *nessacery* evil. Lasse-faire is impossible, because in the case of natural monopolies, some corporation would have exclusive control instead of a government - it would be even worse. You will always be governed, like it or not. It's just a question of whether it will be by the State or by private thugs. Private ownership of *everything* is insane. I do not want to pay a fscking toll on every single road, and have thousands of phone companies trying to lay their own cables all over the place, never being forced to lease them to each other (as the current regulations dictate), so that there are wires everywhere across the country. And I sure as hell don't want to see a private police force. Some libertarians are okay, but just like the big-2 parties, the moderate ones are the ones that are okay, and the pureists are the ones that are dangerous.
What pisses me off is when they assume the 'net somehow deserves stricter or heaver laws than the real-life world. That's quite a luddite attitude. It's the same as the crap they pulled (are pulling) with the CDA 1 and 2. - Something shouldn't be *more* illegal just becasue the internet was involved.
This isn't a site of "olds for nerds", it's "news for nerds", as in "new".
Otherwise, I agree, it was funny when it first came out.
Here is the comment page for "what you think of Kipling".
Use it wisely folks. Don't just say "you suck." Explain yourself slowly and carefully.
Now I can alternate between programming inspirations on Linux and CivIII on Linux without a reboot. Plus the publicity of having a major first-run shrinkwrap game on linux at the same time as Windows is going to really help. Never underestimate the power of shelf space at Best Buy for publicity.
One worry though: it said a network card was listed as 'required hardware' for network play. Why doesn't it work over PPP, I wonder?
And it was last time I saw it on slashdot a few weeks ago.
This is not a party vs party issue. It's a common-sense vs. politician issue.
If I tell the world you are a pedophile, and it turns out you actually are a pedophile, then I am not guilty of slander. However, if I was lying, then I'm guilty.
Before you morons spout off about how bad of an idea that is, try to think about how much power big money would have if there weren't slander laws. For example, if it were legal for Microsoft to start an ad campaign saying Linux will destroy files randomly and crash every 10 minutes and sacrifice your firstborn to Zirkon the space goddess, you know they'd have no qualms about doing it.
FUD is pretty bad, but it would be even worse were it not for the slander law. With the slander law, they have to be very careful to not say anything which is directly false - their lies are restricted to half-truths and connotative ambiguities that can't be technically proven false.
This kind of assumption might be defensible if MS were to finally come out and admit that its Windows crap isn't really multiuser at all. It's assumptions like this on their part that run contrary to their claim to be 'mutli-user'. (With Intel's PIII ID it's even more annoying than the Windows ID, because putting the ID the CPU starts to affect real multiuser systems like Linux too.)
Don't let them spread the myth that workstations must be single-user. Letting that myth take root will kill one of the things that makes Unix better than the rest.
Just because it isn't common in English doesn't mean you can't strip the vowels when pronouncing something. I pronounce "SQL" as "sql". When I feel the need to put in vowels I say "squirrel", but that's not often.
Look, you gun lunatics - the point was that the chief reason given for owning guns, that they can pretect you from gummint men, is proven wrong time and time again.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a totally separate issue. Whether or not the gummint was in the wrong at Waco or Ruby Ridge is irreveant to the point. The guns didn't give the Davidians the ability to fend off the gummint, and they didn't give the Weaver's the ability to either.
No matter what you've got in your gun rack, the gummint's got bigger stuff like tanks and missles, and so on. Regardles of if this is morally wrong, it happens to be true. Your guns are not going to defend you against the government unless there are a hell of a lot of you banded together - in which case you don't need the guns and passive resistance will work too (and make it easier to take the moral high ground).
Why don't you guys admit the truth - that you aren't stockpiling guns to fight the government - you are doing it to fight other ordinary citizens that you don't like.
According to the rules, every class that is part of the official portable cross-platform Java spec goes into the java.* heirarchy (java.lang, java.util, java.awt, etc...). Anything that is not portable goes outside the java.* heirarchy, for example, "mystuff.whatever.classA", or perhaps something like "win32.some.proprietary.exra".
The idea is that then, unlike in most other languages, the programmer doesn't need to rely on some big manual to figure out what is and isn't portable - the programmer just knows from the name of the class in the hierarchy if it is proprietary or not.
That's what MS ruined, by adding Win32-specific extras to the java.* hierarchy instead of as separate classes. And that's what Sun's complaint is about.
Under the new license, people could grab sun's source and make their own versions of the classes, but they'd better not install them into java.* like MS tried to do - put them somewhere else.
They are refusing more than just support.
They are also refusing to connect the customer at all unless they have the approved configuration. That is very unfair. Not every customer is a technophobe-cant-program-your-VCR moron who needs hand-holding to install this. They are denying access to those who could hook it up themselves. That's dumb. It's like selling a car with the hood nailed shut.
Here's some real criticisms of Apple:
1 - Crappy memory protection: One app stepping on the memory of another so that when you get a 'bomb', you have no idea which app is *really* the one responsible. The one reported is not necessarily the culplrit, since it can be screwing up merely because another app stepped on *it*.
2 - Crappy Multitasking: Apps that have to be written to be 'polite' and abdicate CPU time to each other to get it to work. This is in programmer-land and not OS-land that this is done.
3 - Vendor lock-in. What Microsoft is to opensource, Apple is to openhardware.
Don't get me wrong, Apple is fine for desktop stuff, but desktop stuff isn't where the really 'hard' problems in OS design live. Server stuff is the hard part. (So, in other words, saying that Apple is a good desktop machine isn't saying much for the OS.)
And I fully agree that what Bell Atlantic is doing is wrong. I side with Mac users on this one. An enemy of my enemy is my friend. (The enemy in this case being idiotic closed vendor lock-in for no real technical reason.) I just take exception to your claim that *all* the bad stuff said about Apple is FUD. Apple does have some real technical problems with its OS.