Firstly, Windows Update speaks http to get the files from Microsoft, so it is in fact also a web browser, just an automated one without a direct human interface, much like, say, "www-get" is, or a search engine's web spider is.
Secondly, There are updates to hardware drivers that don't come from Microsoft, and these are only available via web sites.
MS's lack of security has nothing to do with lack of firewalls and anti-virus software. Their problem is with the stuff they *DO* include, like happy whiz-bang-impress-the-idiots interfaces that have security holes. The holes aren't plugged because they are actually part of the design - they are there to make things easy and "neato" without the user having to intervene much - but features that work without the user knowing anything at all about them is just what opens the system up to outside abuse.
"Fixing" windows security by including anti-virus software and a firewall is attacking the symptom, not the cause. It's like bandaging a stab wound without bothering to take out the knife that's still in it.
Actually what a lot of scientists are saying is that perhaps global warming is currently *masking* an ice age. Looking through geological records, ice ages seem to be a naturally occurring periodic thing, and by the pattern previous established, we should be in one right now but we're not. It might be that the increase in CO2 levels is forestalling the ice age this time around.
Actually, what makes the Indian English accent so hard to parse is not only the fact that the pitch keeps "lilting" upward, but that the speed is very high. For whatever reason, Indian English speakers tend to speak very quickly, as if it is a contest to spit the syllables out as fast as possible. To hear this in an unfamiliar accent makes it really hard. (I've been told by non-native English speakers that I sound the same way, (speed-wise, not pitch-wise). I am difficult to understand because I tend to speak to quickly and mumble the vowel sounds (which is an effective way to speed up speech, assuming the listener can still pick out the words, and it's a common facet of a North Midwestern accent.) I also have a low-pitch voice, and this also can make it hard to understand me. I think it has to do with repetitions of waveforms. (If you hear a high-pitched waveform, your brain might pick up thousands of repetitions of the pattern, and thus "lock in" what it sounds like, but a low-pitched version of the same waveform will only have hundreds of repetitions, and so it's harder for the brain to filter out the noise and lock on to what it is hearing. Basically, lower-frequency equals lower-bandwith information passing to the brain for it to decode.)
Are you so arrogant as to not take into account the possibility that I read it and just didn't agree with you?
I was operating under the assumption that there is a charge of some sort because the alternative paints the authorities in an even worse light. If they took the property (even just temporarily) without actually having charges filed, then instead of being guilty of arrest without cause, the authorities are instead guilty of theft. If they are merely investigating, they don't have the right to confiscate property and disrupt Indymedia's service.
Take your pick - theft of services and property, or arrest without cause. One of those two things has occurred here.
"Slippery slope" is not a sufficient moniker to determine if something is a fallacy or not. It describes a particular format of argument, which may or may not be fallicious depending on its component parts.
For example, If your argument has premises: A leads to B, and B leads to C, and C leads to D, therefore A leads to D, that is a slippery slope argument. It only becomes fallicious if you switch certainty levels partway through, as in:
A always leads to B,
B leads to C often,
C leads to D often, Fallacy: "Therefore A always leads to D." Not Fallacy: "Therefore A has a good chance of leading to D."
It's like the difference between calling an argument a "dichotomy" and calling it a "false dichotomy". One is the generic term for the pattern, and the other is the term for when it is misused.
Good dichotomy argument:
All people are either in the "bald" group or the "have hair" group.
Brad is not a person who has hair.
Therefore Brad is bald.
Bad "false dichotomy" argument:
All people are either blonde haired, red-headed, or black-haired.
Brad is neither blonde nor red-headed.
Therefore Brad is black-haired. (Nope, Actually he's bald.)
Calling all slippery slope arguments fallacies is just like calling all dichotomies false dichotomies.
And by the way you claimed that formal logic deals in absolutes. This is false. Note how many formal argument textbook examples use the word "some", as in, "Some X are Y".
Re:No wolves here, but a hell of a lot of sheeple
on
The Empires Strike Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you really think it's the right thing to do to tell everyone "Hey, we're investigating a sheep fucker over here!!!".
Do you think it's right to not even tell the accused that the accusation is sheep fucking either?
You're talking about not releasing information to the public. The problem is that they aren't even releasing information to the accused either. When the police come to mess with you, you have every right to know why.
until the goverment says why they raided the place everyone is really just crying wolf.
You are conveiniently ignoring the fact that what people are complaining about most isn't just that the raid took place, but that there is no way to tell WHY it took place. You act as if there's no reason to complain until the reason becomes known. That is 100% backward. The fact that the reason is currently unknown *IS* the cause to complain.
Sounds like lawyers have the same needs as programmers - a precise, unambiguous language. Unfortunately they have to keep doing everything in English, a language that is very complex and dependant on the context of second-guessing what the speaker was thinking.
The court order includes a rule that you can't give any further details to anybody. By asking rackspace to break that order, you are asking them to not just merely protest a bad law to go to bat for you, but to also actually break the law to go to bat for you. Is it a bad law that it is legal for the authorities to prevent someone from passing on this information to their clients? Absolutely. Should it be challenged in court? Absolutely. Is it a business's obligation, however, to break the law in order to trigger such a challenge for one of their clients? No. Any business willing to do this and take the risk would be martyring themselves for a cause.
How do you know they didn't protest? That's the nature of a gag order - you can't tell. Any protest filed would have been just a secret as the takedown order.
On the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand it seems really unfair for Rackspace to lose their business over this. They're just as much the victim here as their clients are.
The difference is about what the public knows. In the hardware store, the public understands how old the technology of putting lumber together with nails is, and they understand it would be ludicrus for someone to patent that because they all already know about it. Contrast that with software, where the average person has no clue how it is made, and no clue what is and is not already possible with it. Therefore the average person can't tell when something obviously "feels" like prior art. This is why people get away with patenting already-common knowlege in software - it's because it's only known to be common to those few who work in the business. To everyone else, it's like, "Wow! You can actually "compile" code now! Neat! What's that mean?"
Are you a roleplayer? If so, you can gain a lot of insight into how far off the average person's view of computers is by reading the rules for any computer-based activity in any RPG. You'll find such gems as "A compiler is a program that makes other programs run faster by making them smaller."
Oh, and as to your sig, the ability to retroactively alter a post after it has been seen by others opens the door for historical revisionism. That's why slashdot doesn't do it. Just get in the habit of using the preview button if you feel the need to edit things. If you want to edit things after they are responded to, too bad. (I might be okay with editing posts in the case where the post has not yet been replied to, but then there needs to be a locking mechanism to prevent people from replying to a post that is being edited.)
The bigger concern is Tacoma - it's pretty much going to be flattened if the volcano goes and the glacier melt ends up following the valleys as expected. One possible escape method is by large ship. Tacoma does have a harbor sufficient to support ocean-going cargo frieghters You could fit an awful lot of people on one ocean cargo ship, especially if all you are planning on doing is moving them a ways north up puget sound and don't plan on actually heading out to the ocean.
(One of the reasons Ranier is such a danger isn't so much the size of the eruption itself that would likely occur, but the pretty magestic white slopes. In an eruption all those icy glaciers will liquify and make a massive rushing flood of muddy goo all the way to Puget Sound, ruining all cities in the way. Ranier has the most ice of any mountain in the United States.)
Remember that the whole point of the DRM they are using is to try to prevent you from actually making your own copies of the documentation. So to view the docs while working on a unix program, dual-booting is insufficient. You can't view the docs in Windows and make copies or printouts for later use while booted in unix. You can't program in unix while simultaneously reading these docs unless you have two computers side by side, and then you can't cut&paste from doc examples into a text editor to try things out (a very useful feature of online documentation, normally).
Is this making it impossible for someone to try to use the docs in the way they were meant to be used by the court order? No. Is this a weasly way to put an extra unnecessary hurdle in place to slow down such activity, and thus obey the letter ofthe law but not the spirit of the law? Yes.
It also appears to be faster, and therefore possibly actually useful. I suspect that if the segway went more that a piddly 10 Mph people might have actually warmed up to the idea despite how dorky it looks (people got used to wearing bicycle helmets, right? When they first started showing up, everyone thought they looked really dorky and now they're ordinary and mundane.) The problem with the segway as sold was that even a rather out-of-shape person can still make 10 Mph easily on a bicycle without breaking a sweat, and thus the segway has no niche.
You're not getting it - anything not directly related to the cost of making the music is something I am considering markup because I'm comparing CD sales to electronic sales. Case? Markup. Booklet? Markup. Sales and Marketing? Markup. The fact that there is all this extra pointless stuff embedded into the price of the CD is precisely the problem with the MPAA trying to use it as their primary means of revenue. It might not look like markup to the industry, but it does to the consumer interested in just a digital music file. To that consumer, the jacket and case is useless markup. The sales and marketing are useless markup. The shipping cost is pointless markup.
When the product being sold to the consumer is "stuff the consumer is trying to get, plus a bunch of stuff the consumer doesn't want bundled with it", then the cost of that bundled stuff is markup, from the consumer's point of view.
If I want to install Windows so I can play a computer game, the fact that a good portion of the purchase is going toward paying developers writing internet explorer is, to me, markup, since I don't use internet explorer.
94% of web user agent strings is entirey different from 94% of browsers, given that browsers are sometimes configured to lie about their identity in order to get access to all the web sites.
And you're ignoring the fact that it's precisely those other browsers that are the ones being run be the people that actually need this information. The ones that can read it are the ones that don't need it.
Explaining God to a human is like explaining differential calculus to a lizard (or President W. HA) you just can't do it and I accept that.
The problem I have with this is that the only logical conclusion I can see it leading to is really this: "God is a soemthing-or-other - I have no clue what it is and I never can, and therefore saying god exists actually is a rather meaningless statement since it just amounts to saying 'something-or-other exists'." And yet, time and time again the conclusion people come to with this argument is much, much more precise than that. Even positing god as some sort of sentient being of some sort is already violating the claim that god is beyond our ability to understand. At some point along the way the definition of "god" shifts in mid-argument from "whatever the heck caused the universe, whatever it may be" into "a thinking entity directing things with intent and purpose". That's a very signifigant shift, and one that typically happens 'secretly' without explicitly stating it.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, Windows Update speaks http to get the files from Microsoft, so it is in fact also a web browser, just an automated one without a direct human interface, much like, say, "www-get" is, or a search engine's web spider is.
Secondly, There are updates to hardware drivers that don't come from Microsoft, and these are only available via web sites.
MS's lack of security has nothing to do with lack of firewalls and anti-virus software. Their problem is with the stuff they *DO* include, like happy whiz-bang-impress-the-idiots interfaces that have security holes. The holes aren't plugged because they are actually part of the design - they are there to make things easy and "neato" without the user having to intervene much - but features that work without the user knowing anything at all about them is just what opens the system up to outside abuse.
"Fixing" windows security by including anti-virus software and a firewall is attacking the symptom, not the cause. It's like bandaging a stab wound without bothering to take out the knife that's still in it.
Actually what a lot of scientists are saying is that perhaps global warming is currently *masking* an ice age. Looking through geological records, ice ages seem to be a naturally occurring periodic thing, and by the pattern previous established, we should be in one right now but we're not. It might be that the increase in CO2 levels is forestalling the ice age this time around.
Actually, what makes the Indian English accent so hard to parse is not only the fact that the pitch keeps "lilting" upward, but that the speed is very high. For whatever reason, Indian English speakers tend to speak very quickly, as if it is a contest to spit the syllables out as fast as possible. To hear this in an unfamiliar accent makes it really hard. (I've been told by non-native English speakers that I sound the same way, (speed-wise, not pitch-wise). I am difficult to understand because I tend to speak to quickly and mumble the vowel sounds (which is an effective way to speed up speech, assuming the listener can still pick out the words, and it's a common facet of a North Midwestern accent.)
I also have a low-pitch voice, and this also can make it hard to understand me. I think it has to do with repetitions of waveforms. (If you hear a high-pitched waveform, your brain might pick up thousands of repetitions of the pattern, and thus "lock in" what it sounds like, but a low-pitched version of the same waveform will only have hundreds of repetitions, and so it's harder for the brain to filter out the noise and lock on to what it is hearing. Basically, lower-frequency equals lower-bandwith information passing to the brain for it to decode.)
I'm not asking that they violate any laws, merely that they file legal protests
With the gag order in place, for all we know they just might have done that, and just can't talk about it (without violating a law).
Evidentally, you didn't read the rest of my post.
Are you so arrogant as to not take into account the possibility that I read it and just didn't agree with you?
I was operating under the assumption that there is a charge of some sort because the alternative paints the authorities in an even worse light. If they took the property (even just temporarily) without actually having charges filed, then instead of being guilty of arrest without cause, the authorities are instead guilty of theft. If they are merely investigating, they don't have the right to confiscate property and disrupt Indymedia's service.
Take your pick - theft of services and property, or arrest without cause. One of those two things has occurred here.
I prefer "Randroid".
Horrible ping times, though.
"Slippery slope" is not a sufficient moniker to determine if something is a fallacy or not. It describes a particular format of argument, which may or may not be fallicious depending on its component parts.
For example, If your argument has premises: A leads to B, and B leads to C, and C leads to D, therefore A leads to D, that is a slippery slope argument. It only becomes fallicious if you switch certainty levels partway through, as in:
A always leads to B,
B leads to C often,
C leads to D often,
Fallacy: "Therefore A always leads to D."
Not Fallacy: "Therefore A has a good chance of leading to D."
It's like the difference between calling an argument a "dichotomy" and calling it a "false dichotomy". One is the generic term for the pattern, and the other is the term for when it is misused.
Good dichotomy argument:
All people are either in the "bald" group or the "have hair" group.
Brad is not a person who has hair.
Therefore Brad is bald.
Bad "false dichotomy" argument:
All people are either blonde haired, red-headed, or black-haired.
Brad is neither blonde nor red-headed.
Therefore Brad is black-haired. (Nope, Actually he's bald.)
Calling all slippery slope arguments fallacies is just like calling all dichotomies false dichotomies.
And by the way you claimed that formal logic deals in absolutes. This is false. Note how many formal argument textbook examples use the word "some", as in, "Some X are Y".
Do you really think it's the right thing to do to tell everyone "Hey, we're investigating a sheep fucker over here!!!".
Do you think it's right to not even tell the accused that the accusation is sheep fucking either?
You're talking about not releasing information to the public. The problem is that they aren't even releasing information to the accused either. When the police come to mess with you, you have every right to know why.
until the goverment says why they raided the place everyone is really just crying wolf.
You are conveiniently ignoring the fact that what people are complaining about most isn't just that the raid took place, but that there is no way to tell WHY it took place. You act as if there's no reason to complain until the reason becomes known. That is 100% backward. The fact that the reason is currently unknown *IS* the cause to complain.
Sounds like lawyers have the same needs as programmers - a precise, unambiguous language. Unfortunately they have to keep doing everything in English, a language that is very complex and dependant on the context of second-guessing what the speaker was thinking.
The court order includes a rule that you can't give any further details to anybody. By asking rackspace to break that order, you are asking them to not just merely protest a bad law to go to bat for you, but to also actually break the law to go to bat for you. Is it a bad law that it is legal for the authorities to prevent someone from passing on this information to their clients? Absolutely. Should it be challenged in court? Absolutely. Is it a business's obligation, however, to break the law in order to trigger such a challenge for one of their clients? No. Any business willing to do this and take the risk would be martyring themselves for a cause.
How do you know they didn't protest? That's the nature of a gag order - you can't tell. Any protest filed would have been just a secret as the takedown order.
On the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand it seems really unfair for Rackspace to lose their business over this. They're just as much the victim here as their clients are.
Sorry. The most ice in the contiguous 48 states.
The difference is about what the public knows. In the hardware store, the public understands how old the technology of putting lumber together with nails is, and they understand it would be ludicrus for someone to patent that because they all already know about it. Contrast that with software, where the average person has no clue how it is made, and no clue what is and is not already possible with it. Therefore the average person can't tell when something obviously "feels" like prior art. This is why people get away with patenting already-common knowlege in software - it's because it's only known to be common to those few who work in the business. To everyone else, it's like, "Wow! You can actually "compile" code now! Neat! What's that mean?"
Are you a roleplayer? If so, you can gain a lot of insight into how far off the average person's view of computers is by reading the rules for any computer-based activity in any RPG. You'll find such gems as "A compiler is a program that makes other programs run faster by making them smaller."
Oh, and as to your sig, the ability to retroactively alter a post after it has been seen by others opens the door for historical revisionism. That's why slashdot doesn't do it. Just get in the habit of using the preview button if you feel the need to edit things. If you want to edit things after they are responded to, too bad. (I might be okay with editing posts in the case where the post has not yet been replied to, but then there needs to be a locking mechanism to prevent people from replying to a post that is being edited.)
The bigger concern is Tacoma - it's pretty much going to be flattened if the volcano goes and the glacier melt ends up following the valleys as expected. One possible escape method is by large ship. Tacoma does have a harbor sufficient to support ocean-going cargo frieghters You could fit an awful lot of people on one ocean cargo ship, especially if all you are planning on doing is moving them a ways north up puget sound and don't plan on actually heading out to the ocean.
(One of the reasons Ranier is such a danger isn't so much the size of the eruption itself that would likely occur, but the pretty magestic white slopes. In an eruption all those icy glaciers will liquify and make a massive rushing flood of muddy goo all the way to Puget Sound, ruining all cities in the way. Ranier has the most ice of any mountain in the United States.)
The Senate voted against it 99-1. No one supported it.
That statement is obviously self contradictory.
Remember that the whole point of the DRM they are using is to try to prevent you from actually making your own copies of the documentation. So to view the docs while working on a unix program, dual-booting is insufficient. You can't view the docs in Windows and make copies or printouts for later use while booted in unix. You can't program in unix while simultaneously reading these docs unless you have two computers side by side, and then you can't cut&paste from doc examples into a text editor to try things out (a very useful feature of online documentation, normally).
Is this making it impossible for someone to try to use the docs in the way they were meant to be used by the court order? No. Is this a weasly way to put an extra unnecessary hurdle in place to slow down such activity, and thus obey the letter ofthe law but not the spirit of the law? Yes.
It also appears to be faster, and therefore possibly actually useful. I suspect that if the segway went more that a piddly 10 Mph people might have actually warmed up to the idea despite how dorky it looks (people got used to wearing bicycle helmets, right? When they first started showing up, everyone thought they looked really dorky and now they're ordinary and mundane.) The problem with the segway as sold was that even a rather out-of-shape person can still make 10 Mph easily on a bicycle without breaking a sweat, and thus the segway has no niche.
Actually the leading cause of death is ageing.
Now, if you meant premature death, then maybe you'd be on to something.
You're not getting it - anything not directly related to the cost of making the music is something I am considering markup because I'm comparing CD sales to electronic sales. Case? Markup. Booklet? Markup. Sales and Marketing? Markup. The fact that there is all this extra pointless stuff embedded into the price of the CD is precisely the problem with the MPAA trying to use it as their primary means of revenue.
It might not look like markup to the industry, but it does to the consumer interested in just a digital music file. To that consumer, the jacket and case is useless markup. The sales and marketing are useless markup. The shipping cost is pointless markup.
When the product being sold to the consumer is "stuff the consumer is trying to get, plus a bunch of stuff the consumer doesn't want bundled with it", then the cost of that bundled stuff is markup, from the consumer's point of view.
If I want to install Windows so I can play a computer game, the fact that a good portion of the purchase is going toward paying developers writing internet explorer is, to me, markup, since I don't use internet explorer.
This is the same kind of situation.
94% of web user agent strings is entirey different from 94% of browsers, given that browsers are sometimes configured to lie about their identity in order to get access to all the web sites.
And you're ignoring the fact that it's precisely those other browsers that are the ones being run be the people that actually need this information. The ones that can read it are the ones that don't need it.
Explaining God to a human is like explaining differential calculus to a lizard (or President W. HA) you just can't do it and I accept that.
The problem I have with this is that the only logical conclusion I can see it leading to is really this: "God is a soemthing-or-other - I have no clue what it is and I never can, and therefore saying god exists actually is a rather meaningless statement since it just amounts to saying 'something-or-other exists'." And yet, time and time again the conclusion people come to with this argument is much, much more precise than that. Even positing god as some sort of sentient being of some sort is already violating the claim that god is beyond our ability to understand. At some point along the way the definition of "god" shifts in mid-argument from "whatever the heck caused the universe, whatever it may be" into "a thinking entity directing things with intent and purpose". That's a very signifigant shift, and one that typically happens 'secretly' without explicitly stating it.