The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution ends up meaning that you are never required to tell the truth in court if doing so would implicate you. (You can't testify against yourself). Thus Perjury is probably only enforcable when you are a third-party witness who is lying - like a friend of the accused, or an expert witness.
In both cases it was a choice between Bad and Worse. I voted Bad.
hehe. A pragmatist. That's how I feel, too, unfortunately.
Vote for a third party that more closely aligns with your views. You won't win, but your consience will be clear. Kill the two-party system that tricks people into thinking that just because you agree with someone on one thing that you have to agree with them on everything else too. This us vs them mentality will be the end of us all. Unless more people vote their consience instead of fearing a 'throw away' vote. (The only reason it's 'throw away' is because everyone else is just as scared as you.)
Am I the only one who gets annoyed with that particular Star Wars line every time I hear it? A parsec is a unit of distance. Exactly how does one brag to have made the "Kessel Run" in less 'distance' than someone else? It makes no sense. It's like saying I've got a fast car because I was able to drive to work in under 12 miles.
Maybe it's some freaky hyperspace thingy. (The way to go faster in hyperspace is to bend space more such that the distance travelled is less, perhaps?) Anyway, it doesn't make any sense.
That's a good idea, but the groups overlap too much. (For example, the fact that Wiccans are a subset of Pagans).
This is especially true of agnosticism. Agnosticism isn't about what you belive, it's about whether you believe you have the proof to back it up or not, and why. It is possible to be an agnostic athiest (Although I know can't technically prove anything, I find the idea of God unconvincing and I put it in the same category as UFOs and leprechauns, which I can't technically disprove either.)
Materialism, as a philosophical term, simply means that you think 'stuff' is all that exists. No 'spirits', no 'souls', or any of that, just 'stuff'. Materialists are almost always determinists too, since with a 100% materialistic viewpoint, the only source for free will would be randomness, and that's not quite the same thing.
Just because you are a materialist doesn't mean your only motivation is distribution of possessions, as was stated earlier in this subthread. You can still be motivated by emotional things like 'the need to be free' or 'love'. You don't have to *own* 'stuff' in order for that 'stuff' to affect you in some way.
I was considering this book until you mentioned that it's where the idea of egoless programming came from.
Egoless programming is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Sure, it gets rid of the problem of people being offended when 'their' code goes wrong, but it also removes all the pride in a job well done, (Hubris, one of Larry Wall's three cardinal properties of good programmers.)
If it's not my code, I don't feel as obligated to get it done right, since it's not my pride on the line.
The problem with judging whether or not something is "good enough" is that everything you are used to always seems "good enough". People once thought typewriters were "good enough". People once thought 640Kb was "good enough". If you've never tried anything better, then you never know what's missing.
(Yes, Windows is plenty good enough in most people's opinions, but since those opinions have been shaped by years of using Windows, it's hardly a meaningful observation.)
Oh one small point - don't forget that some people who eschew proper English rules do it quite on purpose, not out of ignorance. For example, the English rules for quoting things are illogical. It tells you to put punctuation inside the quotes when it's not a part of what the person being quoted said, as in this sentence: Did bob really say, "hello?" IMO, that's plain wrong, since the question mark is an artifact of the sentence surrounding the quote, not a part of what was quoted itself, but it is the right way according to the rules.
Because of this some programmer types deliberately break English rules when they don't make sense.
Another example is the silly notion that some combinations of prefixes and bases are "real" words, and others are not. For example, why is "ingratitude" a word, but "ungratitude" is not? It's totally arbitrary.
I feel sorry for those people who have to try to write software to parse English. It must be quite painful.
Isn't it annoying that people like you try to paint all linux users with one broad brush? Since when are the opinions of this one antigrammarian representative of the whole. He's already shown that his opinions on "The Trial" are different, so why should the differences stop there?
Pretending that all people in a group are identical is the cornerstone of predjudice.
Since when is open source 'thhhbbbbting' Silicon Valley?!? Silicon Valley is where it's strongest. It's "thhhbbbting" Redmond more than Silicon Valley.
The point was valid though. If MS can't hold up its end of the EULA, then the user should not be responsible for holding up his end either. To say anthing else is hypocracy.
If you'd actually been following this story, you'd have known that.
That is precisely the catch-22 that people are protesting, in case you hadn't noticed. MS says it's not their problem because you have to take it to the vendor. The vendor says it's not their problem because MS won't compensate them for the returned product.
It has many benefits over X servers, one being that it works exactly as if I'm sitting at the machine in question.
Uhhh - that's a disadvantage, not an advantage. You see, two people can't comfortably use the mouse and keyboard and screen at the same time, but two people *can* do remote X off the same machine at the same time.
In case you hadn't noticed, MS already does license their source for Windows to some companies, but at an exorbatant price. Citrix's Winframe was developed using licensed Windows source.
So forcing MS to license Windows would mean nothing new at all.
Unless, that is, the ruling says that MS would have to give code to *anyone* who can scrape up the money, and MS can't pick-and-choose who to allow to see the code. That's what makes their current licensing next to useless - not the price but the fact that they can pull the rug out from under you if they change their mind or don't like what you're doing with it (Citrix Winframe).
I've been unable to get down to the 'second level' hierarchy of posts on slashdot - they sometimes come up empty. There is no pattern to it. It's random. This thread is not the first place it's happened, either. Something is broken. This sucks, but not as much as censoring would suck if that's what were really going on (which it isn't).
Thank you. In once post you managed to singlehandedly combine most of the invalid Christian apologists' arguments concisely. Let's go over them, whall we?
Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the first to publicly state and very convincingly argue that "God is dead." It seems that lots of people today like to believe this, or at least live like God is irrelevant. But what many people don't know is that to take God out of any part of our lives is to remove the foundation for a corporate and individual morality. Basically no one has a right to say what is right and what is wrong in any area where God is totally taken out of the picture.
Circular reasoning: You say it is invalid to claim that God does not exist, because he's the moral underpinning of everything in our lives. (He can't be the underpinning if he doesn't exist, thus your argument is nicely circular.)
One example, albeit extreme, of what happens when God is removed from the way we live and what we think is Hitler. It is a well-known fact that Nietzsche's writings became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party and Hitler's personal philosophy.
Hitler quoted Nietzsche some, but one aspect he did not share with Nietzsche was atheism. Hitler was a Catholic. In "Mein Kampf" he claimed to be doing the work of God. You can say that he wasn't really doing the work of God and he was mistaken, but you would be lying if you claimed he was an atheist.
Pascal "Pascal's Wager"
Oh, Puh-lease. Pascal's Wager is bunk. To keep it short, the problems with it are:
It simply tells you to belive in whatever religion has the greatest reward or claims the biggest punishment if you don't believe. Given any religion with a reward of magnatude X and a punishment of magnatude Y, all I have to do to use Pascal's wager to get you to follow a different, made up religion is to invent a religion with a reward of magnatude X+1 or a punishment of magnatude Y+1.
It ignores the fact that there are several kinds of 'believe in God' other than Christianity, and they can't all be right.
It pretends that your perception of what is true and what is false is a matter of choice that you can change just because it would be convienient for you. I belive George Orwell had a word for that ability: "Doublethink". It's not an ability I want to cultivate in myself, thank you very much. If I cut my arm and I'm bleeding, I can't make myself believe I'm not bleeding just because I wish it were true. I can't make myself believe in god for the same reason. Maybe you can, but I still have the ability to distinguish fact from fantasy.
That's what "accepting god into your heart" really means--asking forgiveness for things you've done wrong. Not a last ditch attempt to get into heaven.
No. "Asking forgiveness for things you've done wrong" means "asking forgiveness for things you've done wrong." It does not require a God to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution ends up meaning that you are never required to tell the truth in court if doing so would implicate you. (You can't testify against yourself). Thus Perjury is probably only enforcable when you are a third-party witness who is lying - like a friend of the accused, or an expert witness.
Uhm - wouldn't perjery charges, if they were to be applied, have to wait until after the original trial is over?
Whether or not Clinton had extramarital sex, and whether or not he lied about such has ZERO impact on my life. None.
On the other hand, whether or not Gates can continue to use unfair practices that force me to have to deal with Windows crap *does* affect me.
Vote for a third party that more closely aligns with your views. You won't win, but your consience will be clear. Kill the two-party system that tricks people into thinking that just because you agree with someone on one thing that you have to agree with them on everything else too. This us vs them mentality will be the end of us all. Unless more people vote their consience instead of fearing a 'throw away' vote. (The only reason it's 'throw away' is because everyone else is just as scared as you.)
Am I the only one who gets annoyed with that particular Star Wars line every time I hear it? A parsec is a unit of distance. Exactly how does one brag to have made the "Kessel Run" in less 'distance' than someone else? It makes no sense. It's like saying I've got a fast car because I was able to drive to work in under 12 miles.
Maybe it's some freaky hyperspace thingy. (The way to go faster in hyperspace is to bend space more such that the distance travelled is less, perhaps?) Anyway, it doesn't make any sense.
Telling someone he has to sign his name to what he says is not censorship.
That's a good idea, but the groups overlap too much. (For example, the fact that Wiccans are a subset of Pagans).
This is especially true of agnosticism. Agnosticism isn't about what you belive, it's about whether you believe you have the proof to back it up or not, and why. It is possible to be an agnostic athiest (Although I know can't technically prove anything, I find the idea of God unconvincing and I put it in the same category as UFOs and leprechauns, which I can't technically disprove either.)
Materialism, as a philosophical term, simply means that you think 'stuff' is all that exists. No 'spirits', no 'souls', or any of that, just 'stuff'. Materialists are almost always determinists too, since with a 100% materialistic viewpoint, the only source for free will would be randomness, and that's not quite the same thing.
Just because you are a materialist doesn't mean your only motivation is distribution of possessions, as was stated earlier in this subthread. You can still be motivated by emotional things like 'the need to be free' or 'love'. You don't have to *own* 'stuff' in order for that 'stuff' to affect you in some way.
Egoless programming is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Sure, it gets rid of the problem of people being offended when 'their' code goes wrong, but it also removes all the pride in a job well done, (Hubris, one of Larry Wall's three cardinal properties of good programmers.)
If it's not my code, I don't feel as obligated to get it done right, since it's not my pride on the line.
No, but he must be a Microsoft sheep for actually believing that MSFT is an unbiased source of "primary source materials".
The problem with judging whether or not something is "good enough" is that everything you are used to always seems "good enough". People once thought typewriters were "good enough". People once thought 640Kb was "good enough". If you've never tried anything better, then you never know what's missing.
(Yes, Windows is plenty good enough in most people's opinions, but since those opinions have been shaped by years of using Windows, it's hardly a meaningful observation.)
Did bob really say, "hello?"
IMO, that's plain wrong, since the question mark is an artifact of the sentence surrounding the quote, not a part of what was quoted itself, but it is the right way according to the rules.
Because of this some programmer types deliberately break English rules when they don't make sense.
Another example is the silly notion that some combinations of prefixes and bases are "real" words, and others are not. For example, why is "ingratitude" a word, but "ungratitude" is not? It's totally arbitrary.
I feel sorry for those people who have to try to write software to parse English. It must be quite painful.
Pretending that all people in a group are identical is the cornerstone of predjudice.
Since when is open source 'thhhbbbbting' Silicon Valley?!? Silicon Valley is where it's strongest. It's "thhhbbbting" Redmond more than Silicon Valley.
The point was valid though. If MS can't hold up its end of the EULA, then the user should not be responsible for holding up his end either. To say anthing else is hypocracy.
If you'd actually been following this story, you'd have known that.
That is precisely the catch-22 that people are protesting, in case you hadn't noticed. MS says it's not their problem because you have to take it to the vendor. The vendor says it's not their problem because MS won't compensate them for the returned product.
Uhhh - that's a disadvantage, not an advantage. You see, two people can't comfortably use the mouse and keyboard and screen at the same time, but two people *can* do remote X off the same machine at the same time.
The URL doesn't work for me. Has the site been slashdotted?
There are two reasons that might be the explanation of why the media gives the awards to a specific company instead of to Linux in general:
1 - They have to compare products in the marketplace. The distrubutions are the products, not the underlying kernel.
(or)
2 - They are ignorant.
Neither of the above two are Redhat's fault. They are the beneficiaries of ignorance, but not the causers of it. Stop blaming them.
So forcing MS to license Windows would mean nothing new at all.
Unless, that is, the ruling says that MS would have to give code to *anyone* who can scrape up the money, and MS can't pick-and-choose who to allow to see the code. That's what makes their current licensing next to useless - not the price but the fact that they can pull the rug out from under you if they change their mind or don't like what you're doing with it (Citrix Winframe).
I've been unable to get down to the 'second level' hierarchy of posts on slashdot - they sometimes come up empty. There is no pattern to it. It's random. This thread is not the first place it's happened, either. Something is broken. This sucks, but not as much as censoring would suck if that's what were really going on (which it isn't).
Thank you. In once post you managed to singlehandedly combine most of the invalid Christian apologists' arguments concisely. Let's go over them, whall we?
Circular reasoning: You say it is invalid to claim that God does not exist, because he's the moral underpinning of everything in our lives. (He can't be the underpinning if he doesn't exist, thus your argument is nicely circular.)
Hitler quoted Nietzsche some, but one aspect he did not share with Nietzsche was atheism. Hitler was a Catholic. In "Mein Kampf" he claimed to be doing the work of God. You can say that he wasn't really doing the work of God and he was mistaken, but you would be lying if you claimed he was an atheist.
Oh, Puh-lease. Pascal's Wager is bunk. To keep it short, the problems with it are:
No, but if it happens often enough it *does* prove that the operating system in question isn't as great as it's egotistical proponents claim it to be.
A parellel can be drawn here to Christianity.
No. "Asking forgiveness for things you've done wrong" means "asking forgiveness for things you've done wrong." It does not require a God to do so.