A live preview of minimized programs is nice (it's one of the few visual effects I like in OS X), but I fail to see why that would require 3D hardware.
After all these years, I decided this weekend to start coding a game. It's just a simple sprite-based puzzle/twitch sort of game, and I only needed 2D operations (like bit-BLT), but it turns out the best way to do 2D operations on new hardware is to use OpenGL. Strange, but true. Apparently, the card manufacturers don't bother adding basic 2D operations; everything is geared to 3D.
So, it makes sense they want a 3D-accelerated card for simple operations like their rip-off of Enlightenment's "picture of the running app" minimization.
Also, it allows them to help push new PC sales, which helps make the PC industry richer. Microsoft makes most of its money from Dell and HP and the like, in OEM sales of MS-Windows and MS-Office. If the PC manufacturers don't make money, they are less likely to allow Microsoft to push them into exclusionary deals.
It's not about the musicians. It never has been; I'm just glad they finally gave up the pretense that it is. This is about them making as much money as possible. As long as it is easy for people to get and listen to music, the RIAA members cannot make the most money possible. (Really, I think they could, just like the movie industry started making more money after the advent of VCRs.)
With things that are easily copied, like data and ideas, the only way to make money is by locking up the access to the ideas and data. By controlling the access, they control how much money they'll make, and (more importantly) *which* ideas and data are accessed.
If you want this to be about you, start looking for a download-friendly, musician-friendly label, one that isn't part of the RIAA cartel. Or, start producing yourself.
You are so right, my rights-oppressed friend. But *AAs are culpable for buying the laws; Congress is culpable for selling them.
Both should be punished severely, and I'm not talking swatted across the bare backside by Mistress Trish in her beautiful leather attire, either. I'm talking Smite.
I think this is ultimately the correct approach. I'm currently in the process of implementing something similar for my home email. Each user will get a base email address (say, foo at dreezel.org). Only whitelisted addresses will be delivered to that address; all other mail will bounce.
The user can create new, or targetted email alias from that base, say foo.slashdot at dreezel.org. If the user is very educated, they can create access lists for each specialized address. Otherwise, the aliases are default-accept. This has several advantages; not the least of which is, you can see how your email address is leaking to the spammers.
I'm working on a Thunderbird extension to handle alias management, so my wife and other users can automatically create new aliases when sending to an unknown email address, for instance, or for deleting a compromised alias.
It's not like you need to create a new default-access alias every day. It usually takes a while for a new address to get compromised. I don't think this creates undo burden on the user, and it's a hell of a lot easier to manage than sifting through a spam folder every day looking for the one important email that's sure to have been mis-identified as spam.
I hate when I think I've come up with something terribly clever, only to find someone has beaten me to the punch.
I must be the only geek in the world who thinks Neuromancer sucks monkey. I have tried to read that book a dozen times (really!). I made it about 3/4 of the way through, once, but got, well, bored. The characters were poorly-drawn, the science-fiction aspect had been done better before (and wasn't that good to start with), and his writing style was self-absorbed. He set it in some sort of "underground," as if he were inventing urban science fiction.
I'm not too concerned about the earth. You are right; we'd have to try damned hard to eliminate life on earth.
I *am* kinda concerned about the human species, especially the sample of the species known as "me." To think that other people are causing global warming for their own profit while greatly affecting my future is disturbing.
So, all o' you people dumping emissions and whatnot into the air, and driving your damned vehicles back and forth, and all that, stop! I want my clean air and decently-regulated temperatures back.
Maybe that'll clear up this traffic problem, too. Then I can get to work in a decent amount of time.
Yeah, see, the problem with Europe is that it's compassionate, and y'all are athiestic heathens. You don't follow the example of Jesus Christ, and invade countries to take out ruthless dictators that stop following the orders of the US. That's why we put them there in the first place, Goddamnit!
I mean, if you can't trust a dictator you put in power, who can you trust?
Forget all this "it's for the children" drivel. If you trot that out every time it really is for the children, you'll never be able to use it for stuff like controlling on-line porn. Didn't Jesus teach you anything?
And in the Book of Economics 3:12, Jesus clearly states, "Corporate oversight is as a fart in a closed room; lo, though it shall make you feel better, it doth raise a stink unto the Lord, and is gaseous in His sight." (Bible, New Presidential Version.) The taking of profit over people is an ancient tradition. Who are we to mess with it?
Are you arguing that Bush knew that Iraq had no WMDs (unlike the rest of the world) or that Bush was wrong about the WMDs (along with the rest of the world) or that Iraq did have WMDs, but they were exported before the invasion began (as claimed by an Iraqi Air Force general).
You are insinuating the rest of the world thought Iraq had WMDs. Most of the rest of the world did not believe Iraq had WMDs. Bush was, in fact, going against the world's opinion, not with the world's opinion. According to UN inspectors, Iraq could not have significant amounts of WMDs, nor could they have concealed WMD development programs.
These findings were verified by US inspectors after the initial phase of the war.
How many Iraqis have been saved from torture, mutilation, and rape?
Less than have died as a direct result of the war. Much fewer than those that have been mutilated as a direct result of the war. Seems we carried on the use of torture.
You're probably right about the rapes, though.
If our goal is to stop state-sanctioned torture, mutilation, and rape, why aren't we in Sudan right this minute? More people are being killed there than have ever died by Saddam Hussein's orders.
Were you oppsed (sic) to Clinton's actions in Kosovo/
At the time? Yes. But he at least had UN backing. As it turned out, we were really fighting al Queda there, unlike in Iraq which was known to be antagonistic towards al Queda from the beginning.
So, let me get this straight. It turns out that all the evidence was trumped up by somebody, that the US built its case for war on a pack of lies, and you don't care who's responsible? You don't mind being misled, lied to, and generally deceived?
I'm not that honorable. I do mind being lied to (though I wasn't misled: I didn't believe evidence used to prop up the push to war, as much of it had already been discredited). In fact, I fucking hate being lied to. I want to find out who is responsible for the lies, and I wan't that motherfucker's balls served up on a plate with a side of potato salad and a nice glass of chianti.
I think the strongest ex post facto justification the administration is making is this: Sadaam was obligated to let us inspect and he wasn't cooperating.
Weapons inspectors like Hans Blix stated time and time again that, although they got the run-around a lot, Iraq was essentially co-operating, according to a report given by Hans Blix in January, 2003:
Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable.
Saddam Hussein may have been a mass-murdering despot, but we have let mass-murdering despots slide in the past, and are currently doing so today. The removal of Hussein was not the reason given by the US government in its case for war; therefor, it is not up to us to forgive those who led us to war using that as an excuse. "Democracy" was not a primary goal until much later.
The US conflated Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, when in fact none of the attackers were Iraqi, and many were Saudi. After that was a non-starter, "weapons of mass destruction" became a primary reason. Much of the evidence was in dispute at the time it was presented (as I recall, the aluminum tubes being the first piece of evidence to be declared bunk, but was still trotted out at every dog-and-pony show).
There was no justification to go to war with Iraq. None whatsoever. We had no duty to stop his atrocities, as he wasn't even actively carrying on the systematic murders of a large portion of the population (as is currently going on in Darfur, for instance). If the United States wishes to be the world's policeman, we should at least make sure the world wants us to meddle. And if we're going to trump up false pretenses, we should at least bust out their taillights before we ticket them to make sure the false pretenses will stick.
The president has very little control over the domestic economy.
Uhm.... wrong.
The President has quite a bit of control over the domestic economy. The reason the economy was good under Clinton was because he obeyed one rule with the economy: do not spend more than you make.
There is a direct correlation between a balanced federal budget and the economy. Yes, Clinton enjoyed a false economic boom, but he was doing everything right to *foster* that boom. The national debt plays directly into the confidence of both domestic and foriegn investors, which provides incentive for economic growth. The economy can turn terrible even with strong confidence, that's true; but a good balanced federl budget is a positive influence.
President Bush has helped destroy an already-ailling economy by massively increasing federal spending, while reducing federal incomes. This is terrible for the economy.
Think about this:
Would your family be prosperous for long if you continually spent more than you made?
Or, put another way, what's the easiest way to destroy your finances? A: rack up credit card debt.
The President has made many choices that were against the better interest of domestic economic strength. He doesn't get off the hook so easily.
You can really only call it a hoax if it was deliberate. Giving Bush some slack . ..
Bush has very little, if anything, to do with this. The ones accussed of the hoax are Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The evidence points to these two as the crux of the Iraq war. It is entirely possible that President G. W. Bush is merely a dupe, an easily-played pawn used by a group of high-level government officials, including people like ex-Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. There is strong evidence to support the idea that President Bush has been kept in a fact-free zone, a bubble of security and ignorance so profound, he will take the blame when it comes out how the government lied to the citizens of the US to lead us into a senseless war.
This is only my opinion, but: Bush might be innocent of anything but ignorance, stupidity, and gullibility. Cheney and Rumsfeld are guilty motherfuckers who have betrayed their country for a personal agenda.
The problem with religio-political meddling is not the word, "theory." I mean, both evolution and big bang are scientific theories, right alongside the theory of gravity, Newton's theories of the movement of bodies (which have proven so good they are considered scientific "laws," even with their obvious flaws *cough* quantum uncertainty and general relativity *cough*), and the three theories of thermodynamics (also considered laws).
The problem is that the current administration has taken a perfectly good word ("theory") and corrupted it to mean something entirely different. That's a political trick they are quite good at; consider how they have corrupted other perfectly good words to mean something bad, like "liberal" and "fiscal responsibility."
They have redefined "theory" to include things that are *not* scientific, like intelligent design, and the "theory" of the Liberal Global Warming Hoax Conspiracy. By selectively changing the definitions of words, they can couch the debate in a way more favorable to their political ends. In this case, it is a complete discrediting of science as a method of obtaining Truth, when in fact only the Bible has the ability to give us Truth.
Instead of the enlightened viewpoint you express, most of these people are not interested in using science to discover the face of God. Most of them realize if they do that, the world will not be 8,972 years old like they think; the rapture will most likely not happen in our lifetimes; and worse, the difference between good and evil is not so clear-cut as the difference between Us and Them. Oh, and maybe the US isn't God's Chosen Ones. Maybe the whole world is God's Chosen Ones.
By your calculations I suppose nothing good ever came out of any company that does not give its code away for free. I don't think that's quite the case.
That's hardly what I stated. I maintain we got here by cooperation, not by killing each other off.
Code is not free. But to think you are worth more than others when you started off with their code is disingenuous, to say the least. And if you are going to use other peoples' code and claim it for your own, you better have a big fuckin' bazooka.
As an aside, I have noted this problem in my own brain while reading/.. I'll read one well-written post and agree with it and then read another well-written post and agreed with it too even though it is contradictory.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman
As I think I hinted at, there is so much more in the world than that which is objectively true. I merely wanted to point out the one thing we could count on, however slow and methodical it might be.
We all have much more inside us than is objectively true. We can't be sure of much of it, but I am glad we have it nontheless.
There's a lot to understand about the early days of personal computing. Consider Microsoft: it's biggest accomplishment was porting BASIC (for which they used publicly-available source code) to port to the ALTAIR (for which Mr. Allen wrote the interpreter). So, the BASIC which Mr. Gates so zealously defended was taken from BASIC source code which was publicly available.
His defense of copyright was hypocritical, at best. The one piece of code to which Microsoft had clear copyright (the ALTAIR emulator) was written on a college PDP machine, and wasn't contested. The bit that *was* contested was code *which Gates himself* had taken from public domain.
The historical context is simple. At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved. Everyone stood tall, until Gates and his ilk arrived, standing on the shoulders of giants and proclaiming they were the tallest motherfuckers around.
The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all. Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code? If so, take back Altair BASIC, take back the TCP stack in MS-Windows (taken from BSD TCP), take back MS Internet Explorer and MS HTTP. Take it all away, and see where Microsoft stands.
Historically, his rant was nothing but petty hypocritical gutter-sniping from an ultra-rich college punk.
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that.
Too late. Microsoft has already demonstrated it, and they have much more influence in the market than you or I. There is no amorphous "market." There are companies that sell products. And they are lining up against fair use, and creating a barrier to entry for others who are not on their side.
The simple solution is this: if support is an expense, charge for support. It's just that simple. Businesses do it all the time. Cygnus made millions that way; Red Hat is doing all right too, I hear. From the hardware side, Sun makes a pretty penny on the hardware, but they make even more on support contracts.
Pricing something just to freeze out a certain segment of the population might be standard business practice, but it has nothing to do with the economics of support. It has to do with freezing out a certain portion of the population.
Within a group of voluntary cooperation, both parties in any transaction profit from the transaction.
You say this as if it were axiomatic. It is not. It is only true when all other sources of power and coercion are equal, when both parties are on equal footing.
I have seen too many instances of sleazy people taking advantage of times of grief, or ignorance, or a superior social position. Your axiom works only when honor is involved, and in my experience, too many people lack honor.
Yes, but abiogenisis is pretty much a given, due to first cause. That is, unless you assume life was created at the big bang (or tiny hot puff, if you prefer).
This chain of reasoning leads many to God. It is one of St. Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God. I think this inability to accept abiogenisis is one of the stumbling blocks for most people in accepting evolution through natural selection.
Like all obedient scientifists (I am one) I believe we do not now know how living forms became as rich and diverse as they are in any complete, insightful way.
Our understanding of evolution is far from complete. Our current view does provide insight-- at least, enough insight to help us design cures for diseases, or breed better crops, or predict the evolution of one virus (say, bird flu) into another (say, a hybrid of the bird flu that is virulent in humans).
We're still a long, long way from understanding all the nuts and bolts, though. I think if scientists were willing to state that loudly and in public, we might have more cache in the public eye.
Or, the public might take that as a sign of weakness, and say, "Even scientists admit evolution is wrong!" Which is what they already do, I guess.
When you figure it all out, will you let me know? I'm kind of curious about it all, myself.
This evolution vs. creation debate is just another symptom of a culture war of urban elites vs. ordinary people.
There's a culture war? I'm glad I kept my right to bear arms. I'm ready for war.
There is no evolution vs. creation debate. A debate has two sides presenting logical arguments, point and counterpoint, statement and rebuttal. The evolution vs. creation "debate" is more like this:
E: Genetic diversity changes as the environment puts unequal selection pressure on varying phenotypes. Given sufficient genetic diversity from the starting population, and sufficient genetic drift, a population may change sufficiently to eventually become a new, distinct species.
C: I'm not quite sure what you just said, but we've never seen anything like this happen, so it could not happen. God did it.
E: Well, it takes hundreds of thousands of years for massive changes in larger species, but we have noticed selection pressures create new species within bacteria. Generally, though, it takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
C: But God created the universe 8,296 years ago! Evolution hasn't had enough time.
E: Uhm... so, what about the light from stars millions of light-years away? How did that get here? Did God make the universe with the light already in-transit?
C: Yep. God created a universe with the appearance of old age.
E: You believe in a God that lies to you?
C: Uh... it's not a lie if God did it. It's Divine. Plus, those stars that scientists claim are a long way away are really just God's angels holding flashlights in the heavens.
E: So, God could have made the universe ten minutes ago, and just given you memories?
C: He could have, but he didn't. He made the earth 8,296 ago. Not counting leap-years, because there's no Biblical evidence for leap-years.
E: Riiiiiight.
And so on.
Granted, I've simplified the arguments a bit, but that appears to be the essence of it, with one side claiming the Bible gives us all the truths of the universe, and the other claiming the only proven way to gain objective knowledge is through direct observervation and the scientific method.
Belief in a Creator has blinded a large portion of the US population to facts. No matter how angry you get, no matter what names you call or battle lines you draw, denying evolution is the denial of facts.
You can remain as willfully ignorant as you like. I don't really care. Be angry that none of the "urban elites" believe you, with your monumental I.Q. and your self-rightious belief that only you understand God, because those of us who believe in the results of science most certainly could not understand God.
Let me ask you this, though. Why did God create us with our curiosity and our intellect, if He did not want us to use them? Why did He create the universe, if not for us to explore? Why did He create us in multitudes, if not for us to love and respect each other?
I can't believe that the Christian God I studied in Sunday school would create 6 billion people just for us to hate and fight and kill each other. So why do you hold so much hate for those "urban elites?"
I'm not one of them, you know. I'm a rural elitist intellectual atheist pedagogue with leanings towards objective solopsism.
1) the teaching goes on in the schools, and then you get dangerously close to - if not right on top of - seperation of church and state, with the state imposing a values system (i.e. religious beliefs) where it has no right to,
I hate to burst your bubble here, but religion does not have a monopoly on value systems. The two are not equal, which is what you just stated.
We do have a non-religious value system. It's codified in our laws. We can teach those values in school without stepping on parental toes.
As for belief in creationism, that's fine, believe whatever you want. If you believe God set up the laws of physics and set the universe in motion knowing the outcome, that is a form of creationism, and I'll buy that as a possibility (though not scientifically testable).
If you believe God created the Universe whole-cloth 10,000 years ago, I'm gonna say you're a backwards, willfully-ignorant rube. If you insist that viewpoint is taught in classrooms, I'm gonna say you are intentionally trying to destroy everything we've worked for these last three hundred years, and I'll have to ask you to give back your computers, your vitamins, all the medicines you might take for any allergies and whatnot; because if you deny science as a proven epistomology, you deny the advances made by science.
Religion is not a proven epistomology. You might be able to pass it off as a metaphysics, but that's about it. Religious belief cannot explain the hows; it can only explain the whys. And that is where I start getting pissed, when you take something that is halfway decent at explaining why, and trying to pass it off as knowledge of the how.
The quest for the divine is tricksy and difficult. If there's one thing I know about religion, it's that as soon as you know something about it, you are wrong. Near as I can judge, that is almost the fundamental nature of the divine.
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A live preview of minimized programs is nice (it's one of the few visual effects I like in OS X), but I fail to see why that would require 3D hardware.
After all these years, I decided this weekend to start coding a game. It's just a simple sprite-based puzzle/twitch sort of game, and I only needed 2D operations (like bit-BLT), but it turns out the best way to do 2D operations on new hardware is to use OpenGL. Strange, but true. Apparently, the card manufacturers don't bother adding basic 2D operations; everything is geared to 3D.
So, it makes sense they want a 3D-accelerated card for simple operations like their rip-off of Enlightenment's "picture of the running app" minimization.
Also, it allows them to help push new PC sales, which helps make the PC industry richer. Microsoft makes most of its money from Dell and HP and the like, in OEM sales of MS-Windows and MS-Office. If the PC manufacturers don't make money, they are less likely to allow Microsoft to push them into exclusionary deals.
It's not about the musicians. It never has been; I'm just glad they finally gave up the pretense that it is. This is about them making as much money as possible. As long as it is easy for people to get and listen to music, the RIAA members cannot make the most money possible. (Really, I think they could, just like the movie industry started making more money after the advent of VCRs.)
With things that are easily copied, like data and ideas, the only way to make money is by locking up the access to the ideas and data. By controlling the access, they control how much money they'll make, and (more importantly) *which* ideas and data are accessed.
If you want this to be about you, start looking for a download-friendly, musician-friendly label, one that isn't part of the RIAA cartel. Or, start producing yourself.
You are so right, my rights-oppressed friend. But *AAs are culpable for buying the laws; Congress is culpable for selling them.
Both should be punished severely, and I'm not talking swatted across the bare backside by Mistress Trish in her beautiful leather attire, either. I'm talking Smite.
I hate the business of politics.
I think this is ultimately the correct approach. I'm currently in the process of implementing something similar for my home email. Each user will get a base email address (say, foo at dreezel.org). Only whitelisted addresses will be delivered to that address; all other mail will bounce.
The user can create new, or targetted email alias from that base, say foo.slashdot at dreezel.org. If the user is very educated, they can create access lists for each specialized address. Otherwise, the aliases are default-accept. This has several advantages; not the least of which is, you can see how your email address is leaking to the spammers.
I'm working on a Thunderbird extension to handle alias management, so my wife and other users can automatically create new aliases when sending to an unknown email address, for instance, or for deleting a compromised alias.
It's not like you need to create a new default-access alias every day. It usually takes a while for a new address to get compromised. I don't think this creates undo burden on the user, and it's a hell of a lot easier to manage than sifting through a spam folder every day looking for the one important email that's sure to have been mis-identified as spam.
I hate when I think I've come up with something terribly clever, only to find someone has beaten me to the punch.
I must be the only geek in the world who thinks Neuromancer sucks monkey. I have tried to read that book a dozen times (really!). I made it about 3/4 of the way through, once, but got, well, bored. The characters were poorly-drawn, the science-fiction aspect had been done better before (and wasn't that good to start with), and his writing style was self-absorbed. He set it in some sort of "underground," as if he were inventing urban science fiction.
But maybe that's just me.
I'm not too concerned about the earth. You are right; we'd have to try damned hard to eliminate life on earth.
I *am* kinda concerned about the human species, especially the sample of the species known as "me." To think that other people are causing global warming for their own profit while greatly affecting my future is disturbing.
So, all o' you people dumping emissions and whatnot into the air, and driving your damned vehicles back and forth, and all that, stop ! I want my clean air and decently-regulated temperatures back.
Maybe that'll clear up this traffic problem, too. Then I can get to work in a decent amount of time.
We really outa get these theoretical scientist types out of a lab for a beer.
We can't do that until they split the beer atom.
badda-BING!
Yeah, see, the problem with Europe is that it's compassionate, and y'all are athiestic heathens. You don't follow the example of Jesus Christ, and invade countries to take out ruthless dictators that stop following the orders of the US. That's why we put them there in the first place, Goddamnit!
I mean, if you can't trust a dictator you put in power, who can you trust?
Forget all this "it's for the children" drivel. If you trot that out every time it really is for the children, you'll never be able to use it for stuff like controlling on-line porn. Didn't Jesus teach you anything?
And in the Book of Economics 3:12, Jesus clearly states, "Corporate oversight is as a fart in a closed room; lo, though it shall make you feel better, it doth raise a stink unto the Lord, and is gaseous in His sight." (Bible, New Presidential Version.) The taking of profit over people is an ancient tradition. Who are we to mess with it?
"Compassion" is for anti-war pussies.
Maybe Verizon should think again. The last thing they want is Google to fire up all the dark fiber and use it to connect the entire US for free.
Are you arguing that Bush knew that Iraq had no WMDs (unlike the rest of the world) or that Bush was wrong about the WMDs (along with the rest of the world) or that Iraq did have WMDs, but they were exported before the invasion began (as claimed by an Iraqi Air Force general).
You are insinuating the rest of the world thought Iraq had WMDs. Most of the rest of the world did not believe Iraq had WMDs. Bush was, in fact, going against the world's opinion, not with the world's opinion. According to UN inspectors, Iraq could not have significant amounts of WMDs, nor could they have concealed WMD development programs.
These findings were verified by US inspectors after the initial phase of the war.
How many Iraqis have been saved from torture, mutilation, and rape?
Less than have died as a direct result of the war. Much fewer than those that have been mutilated as a direct result of the war. Seems we carried on the use of torture.
You're probably right about the rapes, though.
If our goal is to stop state-sanctioned torture, mutilation, and rape, why aren't we in Sudan right this minute? More people are being killed there than have ever died by Saddam Hussein's orders.
Were you oppsed (sic) to Clinton's actions in Kosovo/
At the time? Yes. But he at least had UN backing. As it turned out, we were really fighting al Queda there, unlike in Iraq which was known to be antagonistic towards al Queda from the beginning.
So, let me get this straight. It turns out that all the evidence was trumped up by somebody, that the US built its case for war on a pack of lies, and you don't care who's responsible? You don't mind being misled, lied to, and generally deceived?
I'm not that honorable. I do mind being lied to (though I wasn't misled: I didn't believe evidence used to prop up the push to war, as much of it had already been discredited). In fact, I fucking hate being lied to. I want to find out who is responsible for the lies, and I wan't that motherfucker's balls served up on a plate with a side of potato salad and a nice glass of chianti.
Weapons inspectors like Hans Blix stated time and time again that, although they got the run-around a lot, Iraq was essentially co-operating, according to a report given by Hans Blix in January, 2003:
Saddam Hussein may have been a mass-murdering despot, but we have let mass-murdering despots slide in the past, and are currently doing so today. The removal of Hussein was not the reason given by the US government in its case for war; therefor, it is not up to us to forgive those who led us to war using that as an excuse. "Democracy" was not a primary goal until much later.
The US conflated Iraq with the 9/11 attacks, when in fact none of the attackers were Iraqi, and many were Saudi. After that was a non-starter, "weapons of mass destruction" became a primary reason. Much of the evidence was in dispute at the time it was presented (as I recall, the aluminum tubes being the first piece of evidence to be declared bunk, but was still trotted out at every dog-and-pony show).
There was no justification to go to war with Iraq. None whatsoever. We had no duty to stop his atrocities, as he wasn't even actively carrying on the systematic murders of a large portion of the population (as is currently going on in Darfur, for instance). If the United States wishes to be the world's policeman, we should at least make sure the world wants us to meddle. And if we're going to trump up false pretenses, we should at least bust out their taillights before we ticket them to make sure the false pretenses will stick.
The president has very little control over the domestic economy.
Uhm.... wrong.
The President has quite a bit of control over the domestic economy. The reason the economy was good under Clinton was because he obeyed one rule with the economy: do not spend more than you make.
There is a direct correlation between a balanced federal budget and the economy. Yes, Clinton enjoyed a false economic boom, but he was doing everything right to *foster* that boom. The national debt plays directly into the confidence of both domestic and foriegn investors, which provides incentive for economic growth. The economy can turn terrible even with strong confidence, that's true; but a good balanced federl budget is a positive influence.
President Bush has helped destroy an already-ailling economy by massively increasing federal spending, while reducing federal incomes. This is terrible for the economy.
Think about this:
Would your family be prosperous for long if you continually spent more than you made?
Or, put another way, what's the easiest way to destroy your finances? A: rack up credit card debt.
The President has made many choices that were against the better interest of domestic economic strength. He doesn't get off the hook so easily.
You can really only call it a hoax if it was deliberate. Giving Bush some slack . . .
Bush has very little, if anything, to do with this. The ones accussed of the hoax are Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The evidence points to these two as the crux of the Iraq war. It is entirely possible that President G. W. Bush is merely a dupe, an easily-played pawn used by a group of high-level government officials, including people like ex-Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. There is strong evidence to support the idea that President Bush has been kept in a fact-free zone, a bubble of security and ignorance so profound, he will take the blame when it comes out how the government lied to the citizens of the US to lead us into a senseless war.
This is only my opinion, but: Bush might be innocent of anything but ignorance, stupidity, and gullibility. Cheney and Rumsfeld are guilty motherfuckers who have betrayed their country for a personal agenda.
The problem with religio-political meddling is not the word, "theory." I mean, both evolution and big bang are scientific theories, right alongside the theory of gravity, Newton's theories of the movement of bodies (which have proven so good they are considered scientific "laws," even with their obvious flaws *cough* quantum uncertainty and general relativity *cough*), and the three theories of thermodynamics (also considered laws).
The problem is that the current administration has taken a perfectly good word ("theory") and corrupted it to mean something entirely different. That's a political trick they are quite good at; consider how they have corrupted other perfectly good words to mean something bad, like "liberal" and "fiscal responsibility."
They have redefined "theory" to include things that are *not* scientific, like intelligent design, and the "theory" of the Liberal Global Warming Hoax Conspiracy. By selectively changing the definitions of words, they can couch the debate in a way more favorable to their political ends. In this case, it is a complete discrediting of science as a method of obtaining Truth, when in fact only the Bible has the ability to give us Truth.
Instead of the enlightened viewpoint you express, most of these people are not interested in using science to discover the face of God. Most of them realize if they do that, the world will not be 8,972 years old like they think; the rapture will most likely not happen in our lifetimes; and worse, the difference between good and evil is not so clear-cut as the difference between Us and Them. Oh, and maybe the US isn't God's Chosen Ones. Maybe the whole world is God's Chosen Ones.
And where will that leave them?
By your calculations I suppose nothing good ever came out of any company that does not give its code away for free. I don't think that's quite the case.
That's hardly what I stated. I maintain we got here by cooperation, not by killing each other off.
Code is not free. But to think you are worth more than others when you started off with their code is disingenuous, to say the least. And if you are going to use other peoples' code and claim it for your own, you better have a big fuckin' bazooka.
As an aside, I have noted this problem in my own brain while reading /.. I'll read one well-written post and agree with it and then read another well-written post and agreed with it too even though it is contradictory.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman
As I think I hinted at, there is so much more in the world than that which is objectively true. I merely wanted to point out the one thing we could count on, however slow and methodical it might be.
We all have much more inside us than is objectively true. We can't be sure of much of it, but I am glad we have it nontheless.
There's a lot to understand about the early days of personal computing. Consider Microsoft: it's biggest accomplishment was porting BASIC (for which they used publicly-available source code) to port to the ALTAIR (for which Mr. Allen wrote the interpreter). So, the BASIC which Mr. Gates so zealously defended was taken from BASIC source code which was publicly available.
His defense of copyright was hypocritical, at best. The one piece of code to which Microsoft had clear copyright (the ALTAIR emulator) was written on a college PDP machine, and wasn't contested. The bit that *was* contested was code *which Gates himself* had taken from public domain.
The historical context is simple. At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved. Everyone stood tall, until Gates and his ilk arrived, standing on the shoulders of giants and proclaiming they were the tallest motherfuckers around.
The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all. Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code? If so, take back Altair BASIC, take back the TCP stack in MS-Windows (taken from BSD TCP), take back MS Internet Explorer and MS HTTP. Take it all away, and see where Microsoft stands.
Historically, his rant was nothing but petty hypocritical gutter-sniping from an ultra-rich college punk.
How do they taste?
Like Chicken.
If it turns out that hobbyists are a bad thing, then the market will demonstrate that.
Too late. Microsoft has already demonstrated it, and they have much more influence in the market than you or I. There is no amorphous "market." There are companies that sell products. And they are lining up against fair use, and creating a barrier to entry for others who are not on their side.
The simple solution is this: if support is an expense, charge for support. It's just that simple. Businesses do it all the time. Cygnus made millions that way; Red Hat is doing all right too, I hear. From the hardware side, Sun makes a pretty penny on the hardware, but they make even more on support contracts.
Pricing something just to freeze out a certain segment of the population might be standard business practice, but it has nothing to do with the economics of support. It has to do with freezing out a certain portion of the population.
Within a group of voluntary cooperation, both parties in any transaction profit from the transaction.
You say this as if it were axiomatic. It is not. It is only true when all other sources of power and coercion are equal, when both parties are on equal footing.
I have seen too many instances of sleazy people taking advantage of times of grief, or ignorance, or a superior social position. Your axiom works only when honor is involved, and in my experience, too many people lack honor.
Yes, but abiogenisis is pretty much a given, due to first cause. That is, unless you assume life was created at the big bang (or tiny hot puff, if you prefer).
This chain of reasoning leads many to God. It is one of St. Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God. I think this inability to accept abiogenisis is one of the stumbling blocks for most people in accepting evolution through natural selection.
Like all obedient scientifists (I am one) I believe we do not now know how living forms became as rich and diverse as they are in any complete, insightful way.
Our understanding of evolution is far from complete. Our current view does provide insight-- at least, enough insight to help us design cures for diseases, or breed better crops, or predict the evolution of one virus (say, bird flu) into another (say, a hybrid of the bird flu that is virulent in humans).
We're still a long, long way from understanding all the nuts and bolts, though. I think if scientists were willing to state that loudly and in public, we might have more cache in the public eye.
Or, the public might take that as a sign of weakness, and say, "Even scientists admit evolution is wrong!" Which is what they already do, I guess.
When you figure it all out, will you let me know? I'm kind of curious about it all, myself.
My IQ has been measured at 144.
Good for you!
This evolution vs. creation debate is just another symptom of a culture war of urban elites vs. ordinary people.
There's a culture war? I'm glad I kept my right to bear arms. I'm ready for war.
There is no evolution vs. creation debate. A debate has two sides presenting logical arguments, point and counterpoint, statement and rebuttal. The evolution vs. creation "debate" is more like this:
E: Genetic diversity changes as the environment puts unequal selection pressure on varying phenotypes. Given sufficient genetic diversity from the starting population, and sufficient genetic drift, a population may change sufficiently to eventually become a new, distinct species.
C: I'm not quite sure what you just said, but we've never seen anything like this happen, so it could not happen. God did it.
E: Well, it takes hundreds of thousands of years for massive changes in larger species, but we have noticed selection pressures create new species within bacteria. Generally, though, it takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
C: But God created the universe 8,296 years ago! Evolution hasn't had enough time.
E: Uhm... so, what about the light from stars millions of light-years away? How did that get here? Did God make the universe with the light already in-transit?
C: Yep. God created a universe with the appearance of old age.
E: You believe in a God that lies to you?
C: Uh... it's not a lie if God did it. It's Divine. Plus, those stars that scientists claim are a long way away are really just God's angels holding flashlights in the heavens.
E: So, God could have made the universe ten minutes ago, and just given you memories?
C: He could have, but he didn't. He made the earth 8,296 ago. Not counting leap-years, because there's no Biblical evidence for leap-years.
E: Riiiiiight.
And so on.
Granted, I've simplified the arguments a bit, but that appears to be the essence of it, with one side claiming the Bible gives us all the truths of the universe, and the other claiming the only proven way to gain objective knowledge is through direct observervation and the scientific method.
Belief in a Creator has blinded a large portion of the US population to facts. No matter how angry you get, no matter what names you call or battle lines you draw, denying evolution is the denial of facts.
You can remain as willfully ignorant as you like. I don't really care. Be angry that none of the "urban elites" believe you, with your monumental I.Q. and your self-rightious belief that only you understand God, because those of us who believe in the results of science most certainly could not understand God.
Let me ask you this, though. Why did God create us with our curiosity and our intellect, if He did not want us to use them? Why did He create the universe, if not for us to explore? Why did He create us in multitudes, if not for us to love and respect each other?
I can't believe that the Christian God I studied in Sunday school would create 6 billion people just for us to hate and fight and kill each other. So why do you hold so much hate for those "urban elites?"
I'm not one of them, you know. I'm a rural elitist intellectual atheist pedagogue with leanings towards objective solopsism.
1) the teaching goes on in the schools, and then you get dangerously close to - if not right on top of - seperation of church and state, with the state imposing a values system (i.e. religious beliefs) where it has no right to,
I hate to burst your bubble here, but religion does not have a monopoly on value systems. The two are not equal, which is what you just stated.
We do have a non-religious value system. It's codified in our laws. We can teach those values in school without stepping on parental toes.
As for belief in creationism, that's fine, believe whatever you want. If you believe God set up the laws of physics and set the universe in motion knowing the outcome, that is a form of creationism, and I'll buy that as a possibility (though not scientifically testable).
If you believe God created the Universe whole-cloth 10,000 years ago, I'm gonna say you're a backwards, willfully-ignorant rube. If you insist that viewpoint is taught in classrooms, I'm gonna say you are intentionally trying to destroy everything we've worked for these last three hundred years, and I'll have to ask you to give back your computers, your vitamins, all the medicines you might take for any allergies and whatnot; because if you deny science as a proven epistomology, you deny the advances made by science.
Religion is not a proven epistomology. You might be able to pass it off as a metaphysics, but that's about it. Religious belief cannot explain the hows; it can only explain the whys. And that is where I start getting pissed, when you take something that is halfway decent at explaining why, and trying to pass it off as knowledge of the how.
The quest for the divine is tricksy and difficult. If there's one thing I know about religion, it's that as soon as you know something about it, you are wrong. Near as I can judge, that is almost the fundamental nature of the divine.