because a lot of these people have no idea whats happening and might take it badly. Badly as in contacting lawyers, or just really upset.
Contacting users and requiring they do a complete scan of their system with, ooh, prevx or somesuch (it has a free months trial) within a week or they will be cut off, might be better. Even then the customer support costs would be atrocious.
Many processes in the human body are dealt with by the part of the brain that sits in the spine, or the 'lower' brain that has nothing to do with consciousness.
Those could be included and still avoid having a sentient person.
terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note
They already do that. I had a friend who was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer that killed him in four months. Unfortunately his 'doctors' convinced him to allow them to test a drug on him. It helped him not a jot, a fact that they alluded to being likely (being of medical background I could read between the lines of what he was told), but never quite managed to explain clearly for him, and made him puke constantly. I did try to convince him to not take part, but they'd got him on the 'for the good of other people' thing. His was not the first case I encountered where this had occured, just the closest to me.
Terminally ill people make bad subjects. For one thing they're already dying, so your looking at a system in a failure condition, not much useful general data to be had there, and we are, after all, dealing with a person who may want to be doing other stuff in their last bit of time alive. They are also prone to being fragile of mind (not always, but it can happen in those who suddenly find they are dying young), so susceptible to being talked into things not in their best interests.
I'm against it, you may have gathered. Personally I think we should be growing brainless human bodies (as in never had a brain, never alive without external help), and test on them instead. Heck, we might even be able to cuts bits off them for people to use.
For a bit of fun when I was running my solar system model a while back I tried to hit Sol with an asteroid. Its rather tricky, but it can be done if the velocity is low enough and you contrive an orbit. It's virtually impossible, at least I never managed it, to slingshot an object around one of the inner planets and hit the sun.
Yes, yes, I'm a geek, I have no life, I really spent days doing this [/sob]
There's the other thing though, define 'impact'. Most comets are icy, many asteroids are ice and shale. Put those close to the sun and you get vapour, and no more comet/asteroid. That would be an impact. my software can't do such things, but I probably got a few impacts of this type.
Incidentally altering the mass of the sun up to the Chandrasekhar limit doesn't mean any of the planets collapse into the sun, they all get ejected. Neptune gets into an orbit so elliptical and fast that I believe it would be stripped to whatever is at its core before it was finally ejected.
actually, they charge access to their indexing service. The papers, all papers, are expensive as a result.
I don't like it. My papers are in several, and I had to search for ages to get a copy of one I co authored, of which I didn't have the final accepted version. Many such indexing systems also fund conferences, from which they take the resultant papers. They are, alas, a service its hard to do without.
Unless an open access system is properly funded, it won't be able to compete with such academic paper indexing systems. Searching by title isn't enough, you need abstracts, citations, 'also cited by' sections, stuff like that, which all costs money.
This was their one chance to fast track. That's meant for excellent standards that have no dissenting views, and no discernible problems. Now they have to address the problems.
I rather suspect that OOXML is in fact dead, even if they eventually manage to get an ISO certification. Its too late now. After all ODF is already an ISO, easier to implement then OOXML, patent free, with no issues of any type whatsoever. People will choose it simply because its the better format. OOXML will be what people use if they must interact with Microsoft office.
The voyager project is no longer funded as an active project, so there's no reason to embark on a major effort to build new hardware. Besides, why bother when it already exists? It's not as if we can upgrade the voyager probes themselves
there isn't a decent margin selling hard copies of singles. They always used those to sell the albums, which held decent profits.
Singles make some money yes, but not that often, after all, one number one single might sell millions, but the next number one might only be a few thousand, the singles market is very strictly managed. The record companies withdraw singles from sale or reduce availability once they dip in the charts to keep a decent flow of groups, and of course, to make people move to the albums.
Online music on the other hand can make decent money from singles, because they have no manufacture overhead, just licensing. That is still costly because of the record companies being dicks and not letting apple charge ten cents a track or something. Personally I think a price like that and no drm would kill piracy really fast, but then I'm just an ignorant consumer.
In many cases that term is used not because you don't know, or don't think you can find out, but instead to say simply that you don't have the time within the context of the current research to lay out a decent hypothesis, or prepare some defensible proof.
I've used the term several times in publications simply because some work progresses to a deadline, and you have to halt and publish, often before you did everything you wanted to.
It does seem pretty apparent from your other posts that you decided you don't like religion..so I am guessing it doesn't matter what he says or does, you won't like it either way
I won't tell you to stop projecting that legacy onto all religious people, because it's your judgement call to make. But I will tell you that as long as you do, you're living in your own kind of fantasy land. I'm sure it's quite comfortable there, compared to facing the wounded emotions aroused by your particular family history. But wounded emotions never heal without being faced. I hope some day you're ready for that, because the improvement in one's life from their release is nearly priceless. And no, I am not suggesting that that healing comes through being religious.
Oh, I formed my opinions a long time before I learned about my families history. All I knew was that we didn't do the church thing.
Actually most of my opinions of religous people was formed independantly by going out and looking for them. By the time I was 19 I'd encountered and got to know people from a great many religions. I didn't think they were all bad people, some were quite nice, but I saw more than a few people who seemed quite divorced from reality.
You make some fair points, so I should adress them.
Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement.
Oh dear, please don't get me started on the US and its human rights record. Mind you I come from a wealthy Australian Family, and although we left that life (my mother and I left, the money stayed with my father), I still feel bad about looking at the queues of aboriginies that always seemd to be outside of doctors/dentists etc when we just walked right in, due no doubt to our duel status of being white and rich. I didn't know at the time, but we represented the very worst aspect of racism, we, or at least I, didn't even realise it was happening.
Discrimination has always been a problem, doubtless it wil continue to be so, but I despair at our holding up a person like the Dalai Lama as an example of virtue. Better someone who has been a slave, then a representaive of slave holders. And no, I don't know if all slaves are virtuous. If I were made a slave, I don't think virtue would be a prime attribute I would aim for.
or how great the Zulus had it because the British brought them civilization at the point of a gun.
Well first we gave them guns, then they objected to our taking their land and tried to give us the bullets back, then it devolved into this whole nasty thing, I beleive Micheal Cain was there. Englands record as an empire maker isn't the kindest in history.
And you come to us and say that the Dali Llama and upper society was to blame for all this? Its kind of like expecting a medieval king of Europe in the 1300s to come out and say "Let's have an revolution for the people! Equal rights for all! Lets do away with Catholicism and all you believe in while we are at it."
You can't blame him for continuing what has been established for centuries, true. But we shouldn't Laud him as some kind of devine provider of wisdom either.
Things like that need things like printing presses, universities, trade, burghers, factories, and everything else needed for a revolution and a change in culture. Even if the Dali Lama came out and said we need to get rid of the old system, the peasants of Tibet would have said "Reject hundred of years of tradition? The Dali Lama has gone mad! Time for a new Dali Lama!"
That would be the job of the UN. Besides which, the Tibetans may not all want that. Enforced alterations of a society have never gone well. I don't know how to fix their problems, didn't say I did.
So don't tell us things sucked worse under the Lamas because it would have sucked anywhere, and it even sucks even worse with the current regimes policy towards non-ethnic Chinese.
I don't know if its worse under them then any other regime, I just know it sucks.
I happen to know that draft one of the translated Bible, instead of 'In the beginning the World was created', it read 'Tied to the Bed, the Aunt Thirsted'
Wow, I didn't realise that knowing people froma country makes you an expert on that country. Hell, I better contact the UN for a job right away, I must be worth a fortune!
Yes I have read some of his work. Most of what I read was meandering and when subjected to serious scrutiny, ultimatelly meaningless. It has, in my opinion almost no application to the real world other then to increase the fame and wealth of its creater and publishers.
As to why their own people didn't overthrow them. Well, when you're busy just trying to feed your family, such things aren't so easy, especially when the ruling class control virtually all forms of decent communication, which is typically the case.
Quite apart from that, its very well established that when religion has a strong hold on a culture, overthrowing that control (in the event that it is unfair), is supremely hard. In the UK the church had an unchallenged position of power until the black death, during which there was the first recorded incident of ordinary people attacking a priest because he was burying a body inside the city (in a church yard to be exact). before that such an act was unthinkable.
I suppose it hasn't occured to you that there might be a way of life that doesn't revolve around power and greed?
Indeed it has, it is the pondering of such things which helps me identify the flaw in the western idealised view of Tibetan life, and to reject the idea that they have the solution.
Also, so what? I can't spell too well, at least I'm not so hung up on minutia that I base half my comment on being annoyed about a missing 'a'.
My family were christian (catholics). My mother was almost institutionalised at age six because she asked her uncle (a jesuit preist) why it was wrong to ask questions about the bible.
Seriously, he immediatelly insisted she be locked up as insane because she questioned the truth of the bible, she reports him as screaming abuse at her. Fortunately her father (also a religious nutbar, but less so) didn't, because it would have probably ended his marriage.
Crazy people....
I have no liking for religion at all, and no repect for any of the major religions either (after all it is sometimes possible to not like a thing and yet still respect it, not in this case though). None of the current generation of my family are at all religious.
The Tibetan Dali Lama, while he presents himself as a force for enlightenment, is really the head figure for what you might term the upper class of Tibet. Their record for treatment of their own population isn't that great, butit gets glossed over by a west desperate to find a better path to their own enlightenment, whilst handily ignoring the impovorished state in which the peasants live, and have lived for a log time, long before the Chinese turned up. I note that the religous class seemed to do well for themselves before China turned up.
The thing is, they couched their control over Tibet in religious terms, to to properly destabalise that, China must work against their control on those same terms.
Not that I condone China, but they're not the only people with a bad record in this dispute.
The Dali Lama position has frequently been held by people whose selection was extremely useful politically (influential families and such). I find it all highly suspect. Probably because, since I have a reasonable self image, I don't need to delude myself that a country with a population mostly consisting of poor people prone to starvation at the slightest turn of fortune is somehow also the keeper of a path to some higher state of being.
This worries me. As every student of history knows, the first requirement of a dictatorship is to create an enemy.
How sad that this should be Islam. I'm not Islamic, nor am I a Christian, I find all religion suspect. What saddens me is that the Islamic world, whilst currently in a depressed state, is nonetheless the initiator of the modern world we live in. We use their alphabet, utilise and expand their mathematics, and have them to thank for preserving the 'western' ideas of the Greeks.
They weren't always the way they are now. Its desperately sad that the Islamic world is in such a poor condition, with mysogenism an illiteracy so rampant, but we were in the same state not too many centuries ago. Its because of their effect on the western world (particularly their ruling Spain), that drew us out of that state.
If all we do is become as paranoid and militaristic as the more extreme members of their culture (and ours) wish, we risk destroying a hugely important part of our heritage. Better that we step back and start to think of the 'enemy' as people who have problems, and ask them, without using armies, how we can help.
Slashdot Mirror
because a lot of these people have no idea whats happening and might take it badly. Badly as in contacting lawyers, or just really upset.
Contacting users and requiring they do a complete scan of their system with, ooh, prevx or somesuch (it has a free months trial) within a week or they will be cut off, might be better. Even then the customer support costs would be atrocious.
The phrase is 'eat your cake and still have it'
but so many people insist on saying it wrong that hardly anyone realises this is the right way.
people still use those old p2p programs? Wow.
I couldn't be bothered myself. It always seemed like far too much effort when I could just, y'know, listen to the radio or rip from streams.
Many processes in the human body are dealt with by the part of the brain that sits in the spine, or the 'lower' brain that has nothing to do with consciousness.
Those could be included and still avoid having a sentient person.
terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note
They already do that. I had a friend who was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer that killed him in four months. Unfortunately his 'doctors' convinced him to allow them to test a drug on him. It helped him not a jot, a fact that they alluded to being likely (being of medical background I could read between the lines of what he was told), but never quite managed to explain clearly for him, and made him puke constantly. I did try to convince him to not take part, but they'd got him on the 'for the good of other people' thing. His was not the first case I encountered where this had occured, just the closest to me.
Terminally ill people make bad subjects. For one thing they're already dying, so your looking at a system in a failure condition, not much useful general data to be had there, and we are, after all, dealing with a person who may want to be doing other stuff in their last bit of time alive. They are also prone to being fragile of mind (not always, but it can happen in those who suddenly find they are dying young), so susceptible to being talked into things not in their best interests.
I'm against it, you may have gathered. Personally I think we should be growing brainless human bodies (as in never had a brain, never alive without external help), and test on them instead. Heck, we might even be able to cuts bits off them for people to use.
For a bit of fun when I was running my solar system model a while back I tried to hit Sol with an asteroid. Its rather tricky, but it can be done if the velocity is low enough and you contrive an orbit. It's virtually impossible, at least I never managed it, to slingshot an object around one of the inner planets and hit the sun.
Yes, yes, I'm a geek, I have no life, I really spent days doing this [/sob]
There's the other thing though, define 'impact'. Most comets are icy, many asteroids are ice and shale. Put those close to the sun and you get vapour, and no more comet/asteroid. That would be an impact. my software can't do such things, but I probably got a few impacts of this type.
Incidentally altering the mass of the sun up to the Chandrasekhar limit doesn't mean any of the planets collapse into the sun, they all get ejected. Neptune gets into an orbit so elliptical and fast that I believe it would be stripped to whatever is at its core before it was finally ejected.
actually, they charge access to their indexing service. The papers, all papers, are expensive as a result.
I don't like it. My papers are in several, and I had to search for ages to get a copy of one I co authored, of which I didn't have the final accepted version. Many such indexing systems also fund conferences, from which they take the resultant papers. They are, alas, a service its hard to do without.
Unless an open access system is properly funded, it won't be able to compete with such academic paper indexing systems. Searching by title isn't enough, you need abstracts, citations, 'also cited by' sections, stuff like that, which all costs money.
probably, yes.
But only if MSoffice stays top dog. There is no assurance that it will if governments move away from it.
This was their one chance to fast track. That's meant for excellent standards that have no dissenting views, and no discernible problems. Now they have to address the problems.
I rather suspect that OOXML is in fact dead, even if they eventually manage to get an ISO certification. Its too late now. After all ODF is already an ISO, easier to implement then OOXML, patent free, with no issues of any type whatsoever. People will choose it simply because its the better format. OOXML will be what people use if they must interact with Microsoft office.
wipers would have meant extra mass.
Also, they originally thought the rover would only last three months.
The voyager project is no longer funded as an active project, so there's no reason to embark on a major effort to build new hardware. Besides, why bother when it already exists? It's not as if we can upgrade the voyager probes themselves
No, it's b0rk-b0rk-b0rked!
Ok, that's enough, step away from the keyboard and put your hands on the wall, the men with the injection will be along shortly...
there isn't a decent margin selling hard copies of singles. They always used those to sell the albums, which held decent profits.
Singles make some money yes, but not that often, after all, one number one single might sell millions, but the next number one might only be a few thousand, the singles market is very strictly managed. The record companies withdraw singles from sale or reduce availability once they dip in the charts to keep a decent flow of groups, and of course, to make people move to the albums.
Online music on the other hand can make decent money from singles, because they have no manufacture overhead, just licensing. That is still costly because of the record companies being dicks and not letting apple charge ten cents a track or something. Personally I think a price like that and no drm would kill piracy really fast, but then I'm just an ignorant consumer.
hell with that, I want to see this suitcase he speaks of. Then I want to see a photo of him convincing American Airlines to let it on board.
In many cases that term is used not because you don't know, or don't think you can find out, but instead to say simply that you don't have the time within the context of the current research to lay out a decent hypothesis, or prepare some defensible proof.
I've used the term several times in publications simply because some work progresses to a deadline, and you have to halt and publish, often before you did everything you wanted to.
It does seem pretty apparent from your other posts that you decided you don't like religion..so I am guessing it doesn't matter what he says or does, you won't like it either way
Alas yes, we all have our predjudices
I won't tell you to stop projecting that legacy onto all religious people, because it's your judgement call to make. But I will tell you that as long as you do, you're living in your own kind of fantasy land. I'm sure it's quite comfortable there, compared to facing the wounded emotions aroused by your particular family history. But wounded emotions never heal without being faced. I hope some day you're ready for that, because the improvement in one's life from their release is nearly priceless. And no, I am not suggesting that that healing comes through being religious.
Oh, I formed my opinions a long time before I learned about my families history. All I knew was that we didn't do the church thing.
Actually most of my opinions of religous people was formed independantly by going out and looking for them. By the time I was 19 I'd encountered and got to know people from a great many religions. I didn't think they were all bad people, some were quite nice, but I saw more than a few people who seemed quite divorced from reality.
You make some fair points, so I should adress them.
Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement.
Oh dear, please don't get me started on the US and its human rights record. Mind you I come from a wealthy Australian Family, and although we left that life (my mother and I left, the money stayed with my father), I still feel bad about looking at the queues of aboriginies that always seemd to be outside of doctors/dentists etc when we just walked right in, due no doubt to our duel status of being white and rich. I didn't know at the time, but we represented the very worst aspect of racism, we, or at least I, didn't even realise it was happening.
Discrimination has always been a problem, doubtless it wil continue to be so, but I despair at our holding up a person like the Dalai Lama as an example of virtue. Better someone who has been a slave, then a representaive of slave holders. And no, I don't know if all slaves are virtuous. If I were made a slave, I don't think virtue would be a prime attribute I would aim for.
or how great the Zulus had it because the British brought them civilization at the point of a gun.
Well first we gave them guns, then they objected to our taking their land and tried to give us the bullets back, then it devolved into this whole nasty thing, I beleive Micheal Cain was there. Englands record as an empire maker isn't the kindest in history.
And you come to us and say that the Dali Llama and upper society was to blame for all this? Its kind of like expecting a medieval king of Europe in the 1300s to come out and say "Let's have an revolution for the people! Equal rights for all! Lets do away with Catholicism and all you believe in while we are at it."
You can't blame him for continuing what has been established for centuries, true. But we shouldn't Laud him as some kind of devine provider of wisdom either.
Things like that need things like printing presses, universities, trade, burghers, factories, and everything else needed for a revolution and a change in culture. Even if the Dali Lama came out and said we need to get rid of the old system, the peasants of Tibet would have said "Reject hundred of years of tradition? The Dali Lama has gone mad! Time for a new Dali Lama!"
That would be the job of the UN. Besides which, the Tibetans may not all want that. Enforced alterations of a society have never gone well. I don't know how to fix their problems, didn't say I did.
So don't tell us things sucked worse under the Lamas because it would have sucked anywhere, and it even sucks even worse with the current regimes policy towards non-ethnic Chinese.
I don't know if its worse under them then any other regime, I just know it sucks.
I happen to know that draft one of the translated Bible, instead of 'In the beginning the World was created', it read 'Tied to the Bed, the Aunt Thirsted'
Somehow that got edited out, can't think why.
Wow, I didn't realise that knowing people froma country makes you an expert on that country. Hell, I better contact the UN for a job right away, I must be worth a fortune!
Yes I have read some of his work. Most of what I read was meandering and when subjected to serious scrutiny, ultimatelly meaningless. It has, in my opinion almost no application to the real world other then to increase the fame and wealth of its creater and publishers.
As to why their own people didn't overthrow them. Well, when you're busy just trying to feed your family, such things aren't so easy, especially when the ruling class control virtually all forms of decent communication, which is typically the case.
Quite apart from that, its very well established that when religion has a strong hold on a culture, overthrowing that control (in the event that it is unfair), is supremely hard. In the UK the church had an unchallenged position of power until the black death, during which there was the first recorded incident of ordinary people attacking a priest because he was burying a body inside the city (in a church yard to be exact). before that such an act was unthinkable.
I suppose it hasn't occured to you that there might be a way of life that doesn't revolve around power and greed?
Indeed it has, it is the pondering of such things which helps me identify the flaw in the western idealised view of Tibetan life, and to reject the idea that they have the solution.
Also, so what? I can't spell too well, at least I'm not so hung up on minutia that I base half my comment on being annoyed about a missing 'a'.
My family were christian (catholics). My mother was almost institutionalised at age six because she asked her uncle (a jesuit preist) why it was wrong to ask questions about the bible.
Seriously, he immediatelly insisted she be locked up as insane because she questioned the truth of the bible, she reports him as screaming abuse at her. Fortunately her father (also a religious nutbar, but less so) didn't, because it would have probably ended his marriage.
Crazy people....
I have no liking for religion at all, and no repect for any of the major religions either (after all it is sometimes possible to not like a thing and yet still respect it, not in this case though). None of the current generation of my family are at all religious.
The Tibetan Dali Lama, while he presents himself as a force for enlightenment, is really the head figure for what you might term the upper class of Tibet. Their record for treatment of their own population isn't that great, butit gets glossed over by a west desperate to find a better path to their own enlightenment, whilst handily ignoring the impovorished state in which the peasants live, and have lived for a log time, long before the Chinese turned up. I note that the religous class seemed to do well for themselves before China turned up.
The thing is, they couched their control over Tibet in religious terms, to to properly destabalise that, China must work against their control on those same terms.
Not that I condone China, but they're not the only people with a bad record in this dispute.
The Dali Lama position has frequently been held by people whose selection was extremely useful politically (influential families and such). I find it all highly suspect. Probably because, since I have a reasonable self image, I don't need to delude myself that a country with a population mostly consisting of poor people prone to starvation at the slightest turn of fortune is somehow also the keeper of a path to some higher state of being.
This worries me. As every student of history knows, the first requirement of a dictatorship is to create an enemy.
How sad that this should be Islam. I'm not Islamic, nor am I a Christian, I find all religion suspect. What saddens me is that the Islamic world, whilst currently in a depressed state, is nonetheless the initiator of the modern world we live in. We use their alphabet, utilise and expand their mathematics, and have them to thank for preserving the 'western' ideas of the Greeks.
They weren't always the way they are now. Its desperately sad that the Islamic world is in such a poor condition, with mysogenism an illiteracy so rampant, but we were in the same state not too many centuries ago. Its because of their effect on the western world (particularly their ruling Spain), that drew us out of that state.
If all we do is become as paranoid and militaristic as the more extreme members of their culture (and ours) wish, we risk destroying a hugely important part of our heritage. Better that we step back and start to think of the 'enemy' as people who have problems, and ask them, without using armies, how we can help.
I was forced to use AOL for a year until last winter. Actually they're very good in the UK for bittorrent, I had no trouble.