Nice that he didn't bother showing up for the vote. Either he didn't want to reveal his position, or he considered campaigning more important than legislating.
I consider the existence or nonexistence of a universal creator to irrelevant, as it cannot be known
Doesn't that make you an agnostic, rather than an atheist?
If you don't understand the Bible, you should read it more carefully.
The Bible never says that nakedness is evil. Nakedness is sometimes described as shameful (as it was for Adam and Eve), sometimes it is merely unfortunate, and sometimes it is acceptable.
Knowledge is not ability. Nakedness is not evil. Eating the fruit was a result of evil, not a cause of it. Adam and Eve were created innocent, but they were not perfect, nor were they without the ability to sin. They were created with free will, which inherently includes the ability to do evil.
Sin is rebellion. The capacity for sin was always present, but was dormant and unknown until it had something to rebel against. The commandment (do not eat the fruit) provided that opportunity, and sin quickly awakened and manifested itself through action. Through that process, Adam and Eve gained knowledge both of their own capacity and inclination toward evil, and also experiential knowledge of sin and separation from God.
When God said "the day you eat of the tree you will surely die" it was not just a warning, it was a prophecy. God knew they would eat it, that's why he put it there: to give them knowledge of their capacity for evil. God demands goodness, but he gives us the privilege of freely choosing good (as he does); but we have to learn self control to be good.
Maybe you think this makes God a bad parent, but the most wonderful gifts are always a double-edged sword, requiring skill and restraint to benefit from but painful if misused. (Some mundane examples: Pocket knives, bicycles, credit cards, the Internet, drivers licenses, winning the lottery, swimming, women...) God created us to be like him and to be with him, the highest honor and joy possible. The 'sword' here is our freewill; we cannot be like him without it, and we cannot be Good without the ability to freely choose good. The Tree in the Garden was merely our first training wheels, like throwing a kid in the water and saying "swim! swim or drown!" Of course you'll jump in and rescue when he does start to drown, just as God rescued us from our sin. But you'll never know the joy of swimming unless you go through the unpleasant learning process. (Of course in our case, God only rescues us if we choose to be rescued. Apparently he values our free will very highly, often more highly than we often do. Perhaps because it is a sacred reflection of his own free will.)
A single operation would be a FLOP (FLoating-point OPeration). That is more intuitive and also seems to match how it's used in everyday language. The "per second" is understood from the definition (same as it is for Watts).
And FLOPES would be FLoating point OPeration EquivalentS per second, for AMD processors.
This seems to me to be the fundamental contradiction between observed facts, and the assertion that "there was absolutely no death before man fell into sin."
Actually it's a fundamental contradiction between the interpretation of observed facts, and said assertion.
I used a drip coffeemaker for many years but grew dissatisfied with it. Tried lots of different beans but they seemed to have little real effect; some pots were better than others but not remotely as good as the kind of coffee you get in a good dessert restaurant. Also I had to turn the hotplate off quickly or it would give the coffee a burnt taste.
Now I use an Aeropress and it makes excellent coffee. No bitter edge or sour acid, just smooth flavorful espresso. It is easy to adjust the strength to taste. You can also control the smoothness or "bite". Only drawback is it takes a week or two to fine-tune your technique and get a consistent result.
And could someone who has his number call the big red guy and ask him if the temperature in his home is still cozy?
Haven't you heard the north pole is melting? Oh wait, wrong big red guy who enjoys extreme temperatures and, um, is real interested in who's naughty, and who is known as "Nick"... hooboy, my kids ain't gonna like this!
Even when you "purchase" a song, you don't own it. "Renting" or not, you never really own anything other than a license.
Yes you do own it. You own an exact copy, and you can do anything with that copy you please... except copy it. The RIAA cannot come and confiscate your CD.
That's where copyRIGHT comes in. It is the right to make a copy, not the ability. It has nothing to do with ownership. You own it, but your rights are restricted. There are other restricted rights as well, such as the right to public performance or whatever. (For comparison, you may own a car, but you do not have the right to drive it on a public highway unless you are granted that right through a license. Regardless of whether you are granted that right, you still OWN the car.)
A license may grant you the right to copy the song you own, or the right to publicly perform the song you own.
So yes you DO actually own something.
(Software is weird and different and I'm not sure how this concept translates to shrinkwrap licenses and stuff.)
But I'm not interested in lossy digital formats, especially not at $1 a pop, and even more especially not locked into a proprietary format.
What I want is CD-quality audio that I can rip myself. I've stopped buying it though, because of the threat of copy protection. Even the possibility that a CD might be crippled just isn't worth the hassle. Plus it's just too expensive.
So I don't buy, though I used to.
I don't download, though I used to.
I don't share, though I used to.
See, I've discovered I can live without new music. That's what the RIAA taught me. And I found I'm just as happy, and I have more change in my pocket as a bonus. This is not a complaint, actually I should thank them.
Maybe there's a wet-dry cycle. Every now and then it gets over-saturated and squirts out a few oceans' worth? If a meteor cracked the crust maybe that could destabilize things enough to cause an emission. If a large quantity/pressure was built up, even a tiny fracture could result in a catastrophic release (like a breach in a dike).
Did the author even read the article, or is his knee twitching after a cursory skim-over?
Anonymous Reader said: The U.S. is also pushing for reviving a 1962 treaty (never ratified) that would give the large cable distributors (like Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc) ownership of even public domain content if they carry it.
The actual article said: One faction in the negotiations wants to revamp provisions in a 1961 treaty (one that the United States and 80 other countries never signed), with new or expanded intellectual property rights for anyone who "broadcasts" third party content.
Yes giving ownership of public domain content would be insane, but from the article I don't see the U.S.A. proposing that (and apparently they didn't like it in 1961 either).
I liken DRM to the locks on my house: they keep the honest man honest.
So... you don't lock your doors, and you don't think I should either? Interesting.
DRM is not like locks on the outside of my house, it is like an enormous fence around my house that cuts through neighbor's yards, blocks traffic on the street, threatens low-flying aircraft, and is an enormous eyesore to the neighborhood. Worse yet it's full of holes. Basically it makes life for everyone else a giant pain in the butt, without really protecting my property. (Even if it did protect my property, that does not give me the right to extend my empire arbitrarily at the expense of others.)
It's kind of like having your picture taken in a public place. If you don't want to be photographed, stay at home! Don't want your precious music copied? Don't distribute it to the public. Does that cut into your profits? Wah, go get a real job like the rest of us. (Skilled musicians and artists will always be in demand to give *real* performances and produce *real* works. For them, digital productions are just good marketing, and they can produce and distribute these themselves, so we'll still have that. But the studios are just a leech on society, profiting on the hard work of others.)
Copyright was invented in an age where copying was difficult and expensive, and people mostly had to spend their time working for a living not creating art, and publication was expensive. Now we live in an age when copying is free and easy, publication is free and easy, and many people have both the wealth and the time to create art as a recreational hobby. In the age of the internet you don't have to pay people to create, they do it for fun. open Source and the World Wide Web have proven this.
The Copyright system is like the landed gentry of Old Europe, an idea from a past era. There is sometimes value in paying people to create, and sometimes value in protecting products, but it needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up. We've experienced a brief (couple hundred years or so) fling with free governance, free expression, and flourishing arts... as we enter the Age of Sharing, which SHOULD be the golden age of information and art, we find our hands suddenly tied as the powerful seek to control it for profit. The way laws are expanding we are headed for an age of "intellectual slavery" with a new caste of intellectual overlords. I think this is just the vanguard of a much larger threat; if we lose control of our expression and our ideas, we will eventually lose all our freedoms. That may seem extreme, paranoid, conspiracist, whatever... but history has proven that humanity abhors freedom. It never lasts long before some tyrant swoops in to add it to his empire.
I generally use webmail these days but I still use pegasus to download and archive mail. However my wife uses pegasus exclusively, and she won't be happy about switching. Plus we have hundreds of megabytes of pmail archives. It's been a solid and reliable program, never had a need or desire to switch.
Ah well, guess it's time to look at alternatives. People say good things about thunderbird... it'll have to be a client with an open mail archive format, so I can hack a conversion script. (Pmail is easy, it's just a slightly modified unix format.)
Slashdot Mirror
As long as we're stretching analogies out of recognition, the "content" for the buggy manufacturers is transportation.
I can "pirate" from the auto industry by bicycling, or flying. At least that's not illegal (yet).
By my estimate, 750,000 is 8% of the unemployment total. So one out in twelve people at the unemployment office lost their jobs to piracy?
And which year are we talking about? Presumably this didn't just start this year. In 2007 750,000 would be 12.5%, or one person in 8.
I got mglw'nafh and fhtagn but not the rest. Can you say it again without the tentacles in your mouth?
especially the part about chewing...
Ah, but it's cleverly positioned so they get the message anyway.
I guess that will be a lot further left than Joe Biden, who is on the committee.
Nice that he didn't bother showing up for the vote. Either he didn't want to reveal his position, or he considered campaigning more important than legislating.
I could use a 300 GB drive or two.
Apocalyptic event?
Actually an epochalyptic event.
I keep wanting to say Kong Thong
I consider the existence or nonexistence of a universal creator to irrelevant, as it cannot be known Doesn't that make you an agnostic, rather than an atheist?
If you don't understand the Bible, you should read it more carefully.
The Bible never says that nakedness is evil. Nakedness is sometimes described as shameful (as it was for Adam and Eve), sometimes it is merely unfortunate, and sometimes it is acceptable.
Knowledge is not ability. Nakedness is not evil. Eating the fruit was a result of evil, not a cause of it. Adam and Eve were created innocent, but they were not perfect, nor were they without the ability to sin. They were created with free will, which inherently includes the ability to do evil.
Sin is rebellion. The capacity for sin was always present, but was dormant and unknown until it had something to rebel against. The commandment (do not eat the fruit) provided that opportunity, and sin quickly awakened and manifested itself through action. Through that process, Adam and Eve gained knowledge both of their own capacity and inclination toward evil, and also experiential knowledge of sin and separation from God.
When God said "the day you eat of the tree you will surely die" it was not just a warning, it was a prophecy. God knew they would eat it, that's why he put it there: to give them knowledge of their capacity for evil. God demands goodness, but he gives us the privilege of freely choosing good (as he does); but we have to learn self control to be good.
Maybe you think this makes God a bad parent, but the most wonderful gifts are always a double-edged sword, requiring skill and restraint to benefit from but painful if misused. (Some mundane examples: Pocket knives, bicycles, credit cards, the Internet, drivers licenses, winning the lottery, swimming, women...) God created us to be like him and to be with him, the highest honor and joy possible. The 'sword' here is our freewill; we cannot be like him without it, and we cannot be Good without the ability to freely choose good. The Tree in the Garden was merely our first training wheels, like throwing a kid in the water and saying "swim! swim or drown!" Of course you'll jump in and rescue when he does start to drown, just as God rescued us from our sin. But you'll never know the joy of swimming unless you go through the unpleasant learning process. (Of course in our case, God only rescues us if we choose to be rescued. Apparently he values our free will very highly, often more highly than we often do. Perhaps because it is a sacred reflection of his own free will.)
Why not FLoating-point OPerationS per second?
A single operation would be a FLOP (FLoating-point OPeration). That is more intuitive and also seems to match how it's used in everyday language. The "per second" is understood from the definition (same as it is for Watts).
And FLOPES would be FLoating point OPeration EquivalentS per second, for AMD processors.
Correction: he won't forgive them.
You know, God's not in the business of forgiving sin, he's in the business of rehabilitating sinners.
This seems to me to be the fundamental contradiction between observed facts, and the assertion that "there was absolutely no death before man fell into sin."
Actually it's a fundamental contradiction between the interpretation of observed facts, and said assertion.
Try Proverbs 25:2, Isaiah 42:8, Isaiah 48:11, Romans 1:21-23, 1 Cor 1:19
I used a drip coffeemaker for many years but grew dissatisfied with it. Tried lots of different beans but they seemed to have little real effect; some pots were better than others but not remotely as good as the kind of coffee you get in a good dessert restaurant. Also I had to turn the hotplate off quickly or it would give the coffee a burnt taste.
Now I use an Aeropress and it makes excellent coffee. No bitter edge or sour acid, just smooth flavorful espresso. It is easy to adjust the strength to taste. You can also control the smoothness or "bite". Only drawback is it takes a week or two to fine-tune your technique and get a consistent result.
And could someone who has his number call the big red guy and ask him if the temperature in his home is still cozy?
Haven't you heard the north pole is melting? Oh wait, wrong big red guy who enjoys extreme temperatures and, um, is real interested in who's naughty, and who is known as "Nick"... hooboy, my kids ain't gonna like this!
Even when you "purchase" a song, you don't own it. "Renting" or not, you never really own anything other than a license.
Yes you do own it. You own an exact copy, and you can do anything with that copy you please... except copy it. The RIAA cannot come and confiscate your CD.
That's where copyRIGHT comes in. It is the right to make a copy, not the ability. It has nothing to do with ownership. You own it, but your rights are restricted. There are other restricted rights as well, such as the right to public performance or whatever. (For comparison, you may own a car, but you do not have the right to drive it on a public highway unless you are granted that right through a license. Regardless of whether you are granted that right, you still OWN the car.)
A license may grant you the right to copy the song you own, or the right to publicly perform the song you own.
So yes you DO actually own something.
(Software is weird and different and I'm not sure how this concept translates to shrinkwrap licenses and stuff.)
There's plenty of music I'd like to own.
But I'm not interested in lossy digital formats, especially not at $1 a pop, and even more especially not locked into a proprietary format.
What I want is CD-quality audio that I can rip myself. I've stopped buying it though, because of the threat of copy protection. Even the possibility that a CD might be crippled just isn't worth the hassle. Plus it's just too expensive.
So I don't buy, though I used to.
I don't download, though I used to.
I don't share, though I used to.
See, I've discovered I can live without new music. That's what the RIAA taught me. And I found I'm just as happy, and I have more change in my pocket as a bonus. This is not a complaint, actually I should thank them.
So long RIAA. You no longer exist in my world.
According to God, the oceans are there because of unbelief, and someday when unbelief is no longer a problem there will no longer be any oceans.
Maybe there's a wet-dry cycle. Every now and then it gets over-saturated and squirts out a few oceans' worth? If a meteor cracked the crust maybe that could destabilize things enough to cause an emission. If a large quantity/pressure was built up, even a tiny fracture could result in a catastrophic release (like a breach in a dike).
Did the author even read the article, or is his knee twitching after a cursory skim-over?
Anonymous Reader said: The U.S. is also pushing for reviving a 1962 treaty (never ratified) that would give the large cable distributors (like Discovery, Sci-fi, Spike, etc) ownership of even public domain content if they carry it.
The actual article said: One faction in the negotiations wants to revamp provisions in a 1961 treaty (one that the United States and 80 other countries never signed), with new or expanded intellectual property rights for anyone who "broadcasts" third party content.
Yes giving ownership of public domain content would be insane, but from the article I don't see the U.S.A. proposing that (and apparently they didn't like it in 1961 either).
According to http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/2007-Janu ary/001971.html
(linked from the article), the U.S.A. is apaprently in favor of the
narrower signal-based treaty that does NOT give exclusive rights to
broadcasters.
I liken DRM to the locks on my house: they keep the honest man honest.
So... you don't lock your doors, and you don't think I should either? Interesting.
DRM is not like locks on the outside of my house, it is like an enormous fence around my house that cuts through neighbor's yards, blocks traffic on the street, threatens low-flying aircraft, and is an enormous eyesore to the neighborhood. Worse yet it's full of holes. Basically it makes life for everyone else a giant pain in the butt, without really protecting my property. (Even if it did protect my property, that does not give me the right to extend my empire arbitrarily at the expense of others.)
It's kind of like having your picture taken in a public place. If you don't want to be photographed, stay at home! Don't want your precious music copied? Don't distribute it to the public. Does that cut into your profits? Wah, go get a real job like the rest of us. (Skilled musicians and artists will always be in demand to give *real* performances and produce *real* works. For them, digital productions are just good marketing, and they can produce and distribute these themselves, so we'll still have that. But the studios are just a leech on society, profiting on the hard work of others.)
Copyright was invented in an age where copying was difficult and expensive, and people mostly had to spend their time working for a living not creating art, and publication was expensive. Now we live in an age when copying is free and easy, publication is free and easy, and many people have both the wealth and the time to create art as a recreational hobby. In the age of the internet you don't have to pay people to create, they do it for fun. open Source and the World Wide Web have proven this.
The Copyright system is like the landed gentry of Old Europe, an idea from a past era. There is sometimes value in paying people to create, and sometimes value in protecting products, but it needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up. We've experienced a brief (couple hundred years or so) fling with free governance, free expression, and flourishing arts... as we enter the Age of Sharing, which SHOULD be the golden age of information and art, we find our hands suddenly tied as the powerful seek to control it for profit. The way laws are expanding we are headed for an age of "intellectual slavery" with a new caste of intellectual overlords. I think this is just the vanguard of a much larger threat; if we lose control of our expression and our ideas, we will eventually lose all our freedoms. That may seem extreme, paranoid, conspiracist, whatever... but history has proven that humanity abhors freedom. It never lasts long before some tyrant swoops in to add it to his empire.
I generally use webmail these days but I still use pegasus to download and archive mail. However my wife uses pegasus exclusively, and she won't be happy about switching. Plus we have hundreds of megabytes of pmail archives. It's been a solid and reliable program, never had a need or desire to switch.
Ah well, guess it's time to look at alternatives. People say good things about thunderbird... it'll have to be a client with an open mail archive format, so I can hack a conversion script. (Pmail is easy, it's just a slightly modified unix format.)
Not so. Take a 4 year old blueberry picking, wait a few hours, and you will discover that blue, cyan, and purple are quite easy to produce.