Come on we all know that Terry did his best work with Neil Gaiman. Good Omens was right up there with anything Douglas Adams ever did, and I loved his books
Heh, that's quite a backhanded compliment; Pratchett at his best is a much better writer than Adams ever was. Don't misunderstand me: I like Adams. He's clever, often very funny, and has a real talent for the quotable quip. But his books (in particular the HGTTG series) are little more than collections of gags. The plot is negligible, just a skeleton to hang the jokes from, the characters are cartoonish, there is hardly any development. This said, Adams was evolving, growing in experience - as you can see in the Dirk Gently books. It's a tragedy he died before reaching his peak as a writer.
Now, if you only read the first few Pratchett books (or even a few more from the Rincewind the Wizzard series) you'd be justified thinking he's just a fantasy-oriented imitator of Adams. But Pratchett developed a lot over the years. His later books have complex plots and are often built around important ideas and concepts that leave you thinking. Pratchett is also a master of characterization - with a few sentences he creates a distinctive character you often recognize from the real world. And he manages that without losing the fun - you still get those laugh out loud moments. But I think what makes him special is that, while never blind to their quirks and defects, he loves people and his characters. I'd call that wisdom.
Who has root access to every web server in the world to see if they're tracking visitors or not? Remember, tracking is not limited to cookies.
Strawman, and not a very good one either. You don't need access to "every web server in the world". The solution I proposed solves the bulk of the problem: large trackers will be recognized and blacklisted, precisely because they're large. A number of small trackers may avoid blacklisting, but the only way to do that is to remain small, and thus not much of a nuisance. And cookies have nothing to do with my argument, so I don't really know where this comes from.
Who decides which forms of tracking are tracking and which are "tracking"? Who decides which sites are tracking you and which are not? Who maintains the list?
You really haven't read the message you're replying to, have you? I touched on those things in my previous post; however, here it is again: the user has the choice (as opposed to Google's proposal, where the choice is with the ad tracker). He can decide a site is malicious or not, based on whatever criteria he deems important. I expect though that relatively knowledgeable users who don't want to be too bothered will subscribe to a tracker list published by a trusted organization of his choice. And for the average user, Microsoft or Apple or other browser developer can provide a default blacklist automatically updated.
Who pays for it?
What payment are you talking about? The tracker's? The point is exactly that lots of people will stop unwillingly or unknowingly paying the trackers (with their information, that is). Maybe you're talking about the publishers of tracking lists? I assume some may offer the tracking list as a paid service, and if they're good some users may choose to pay. But I'd like to introduce you to this concept of "free software" - look it up, it may surprise you. In the same spirit as free software, I'm pretty sure there'll be lots of community supported tracker lists that users can subscribe to.
There is no way to "not even connect to a tracker's web site" because websites who would ignore DNT would be the same websites who don't provide / lie about their privacy policy.
Of course there is; it's called a blacklist. Knowledgeable people or organizations can identify trackers, and publish up to date lists. Some of us are already doing this, using the h***s file (I hope I don't wake up any trolls), but it's not easy for the average user. The browser should have a built in blacklisting facility and especially a mechanism for easy or, better, automatic updating of the blacklist. The user should get a default list (maybe updateable via Windows or Apple update or similar mechanisms), but he should also be able to choose a trusted organization (like the EFF) and subscribe to updated lists of trackers.
With this design, when some web page includes a link pointing to a web bug in the tracker's domain, my browser will just ignore it. With Google's design, the browser will go grab the bug, and ask the (unknown, untrusted, and probably not in the EU, so not covered by their laws) tracker to be kind and lose money on this transaction. I really don't think it'll work.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Good. The do-not-track project as designed by Mozilla and Google is worthless, and I'm reasonably sure it's intentionally broken. It's just trusting the web site to agree to your browser's plea to please not track it; there is no enforcement mechanism, and no way to even know your request is honored or not. A proper design would not even connect to a tracker's web site.
Of course, Google has a major conflict of interest in this - tracking people is what makes them the big money; that's why I suspect Mozilla and Google came up with this "design", pretending to care about privacy while aware that many users aren't knowledgeable or caring enough to set the DNT flag, and also on the fact that when push comes to shove they can just ignore the "don't track" request. Microsoft is pretty much calling their bluff there.
Energy is getting more and more expensive every day.
Short term, maybe. Long term the trend is definitely the other way round. And compared to the growth of individual income and resources, energy is definitely getting cheaper. Just consider how much energy we can afford to use for everyday things, like driving to the mall or keeping our houses warm. Think how much somebody who lived a hundred or more years ago would have to pay to get the same amount of energy.
One implies being intelligent is just luck in the bilogy dice roll. The other implies you can change your intelligence through some sort of effort.
Prof Nemur said but why did you want to lern to reed and spell in the frist place. I tolld him because all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnians class at the school I ferget alot.
Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus. He said you know Charlie we are not shure how this experamint will werk on pepul because we onley tried it up to now on animils. I said thats what Miss Kinnian tolld me but I dont even care if it herts or anything because Im strong and I will werk hard.
the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers
And that made a big difference in the cultures and politics of the two; the South was focused on agriculture, mainly cotton, and failed to develop a diversified industry. Slavery also led to a more highly stratified society, where large slaveholders held a majority of the wealth and the middle class was much smaller and less powerful than in the North. One of the effects of the concentration of political power into the hands of the big plantation owners was the smaller government and lower levels of taxation in the South. Import tarrifs were also low, because Southern manufacturing was so backwards and oriented towards the needs of farmers that most of the industrial products had to be imported. As a result, the quality and availability of public education were low, leading to widespread illiteracy. Those trends produced a conservative society, oriented towards the past, with little interest in science or progress.
Thinking about it, It's surprising how many of those same differences between the (broadly defined) US North and South cultures are still there today.
Many companies make money by making free stuff. Here are a few: Red Hat, Canonical, Facebook
But the product of Facebook is not the website, and neither are the Linux distros the final products of Red Hat or Canonical. It's like saying a fishing company gives the bait away free. The bait or the code are just production costs, expenses required in order to create their product. For Red Hat the product is support, sold to companies, and for Facebook the product is you, sold to advertisers.
Prosperity and economic growth come from more efficient production of goods and services
Don't forget distribution though. If the current trends continue, most of the extra prosperity brought by productivity growth will be concentrated to a relatively small percentage of the population. If this happens, the total output may be larger but many people could conceivably do worse then they do now.
For purposes of this discussion it pretty much does. Consider the other two options, Apple's OS X products are close enough in complexity to Windows to drop their tiny market share into the same bucket and traditional desktop Linux certainly isn't for the 'only needed a tablet' crowd
You're still not making sense. People bought PCs because they needed the services a PC provided - mail, browsing, development, games, business and so on. Nowadays a lot of those services are available via other platforms - smartphones for mail and web browsing, smartphones and consoles for gaming, clouds for business, so, obviously the global sales of PCs will grow less or even stop growing. That has very little to do with the OS, and nothing to do with Microsoft. The fact that you felt compelled to inject Microsoft in the discussion shows a problem with you: either you're trolling or else your reasoning capacities are completely warped.
Capitalism would do a better job with education, housing and healthcare if government would stop introducing massive distortions in the market.
Nothing in this sentence is even remotely true; you're just reciting right-wing dogma. On housing, weren't you awake in 2008 when the lifting of regulations on capitalism caused the huge housing meltdown? On health care, aren't you aware that the least socialized American health care system costs the most and performs the worst of all developed nations? On education, don't you know that the completely government funded education systems in places like Finland deliver vastly better results than the much less regulated US school system? Maybe you should look sometimes at the real world around you and check whether what happens matches your conceptions. And if they don't, maybe reconsider them.
But I do agree with the other complaints about it having gendered nouns; that's my biggest complaint about it, but again that seems to be a feature of every European language except English for some reason. I'm not a linguist, but I am curious where those ever came from, and why anyone ever thought they'd be a good idea instead of simply confusing.
The reason is that most European languages descend from Indo-European and have inherited gendered nouns from their common ancestor. In early Proto-Indo-European nouns had two genders, animate and inanimate (kind of like modern Basque, I'm told); the animate gender split later into the better known feminine and masculine, and the inanimate gender evolved into the neuter, thus providing the well known Indo-European three genders.
Many descendant languages have lost the neuter, and are left with masculine and feminine, and English lost even this split (remaining only with vestigial traces, like the he/she/it pronouns). Other modern descendants have kept the full three genders (Latin, Greek, German, Romanian, some Slavic languages)
Mark Twain wouldn't agree (see some of his thoughts on German here); just a short quotation for edification:
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.
Jokes aside, German has a great advantage over English (even Mark Twain agrees): it's spelling is much closer to phonemic.
The story is a bit weirder; last year three competing proposals for do not track mechanisms (from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft) were submitted to W3C. The proposal accepted by the W3C was Mozilla's, despite the fact that it's completely broken. I can't understand why it was even proposed, and even less why the W3C chose it over better alternatives. That bad design is what the kerfuffle is about now: W3C and Mozilla have realized their protocol is not worth a damn, and that ad servers will just ignore it, but, for reasons I also can't understand, neither of them would just fix the issue; instead they attack Microsoft for once doing the right thing for users.
Quick explanation of the reason why I say the Mozilla/Google proposals were dodgy: they both rely on individual tracking sites (or, for Google, ad networks) behaving nicely - and in the real world I wouldn't expect all tracking networks, who make their money from getting as much data as they can about users, to put being nice above the almighty dollar. Neither design has a mechanism for enforcing the user's choice for non-cooperative sites, no matter how egregiously they break the rules.
Microsoft's design was technically better: their proposal had teeth, and didn't trust the ad providers. Instead it used tracking lists (kind of global kill files) to identify sites that track you, and stopped the browser from contacting the malicious sites altogether. The tracking lists could be put together by third parties, and the user could choose which lists to use, so the choice was the user's.
The Register has (in the article I linked to above) an interesting quote from Mozilla's privacy officer, Sid Stamm: "Advertisements are a constructive part of the Web ecosystem, and we think blocking ads outright is too detrimental to the Web; instead, we would like to pursue a solution where users and advertising networks can work in concert (instead of in conflict) to balance value with consumers' privacy choices." That quote, coming from somebody who's job description should be to care about the user's privacy, is quite worrying. It could be interpreted to show the weakness in Mozilla's proposed standard was intentional; either way, I believe it was the wrong decision at the time, and that Mozilla's opposition today to MS's opt-in choice is wrong as well.
Resistivity of materials is not solved by switching to DC
That's true; the solution is to also increase the voltage (losses are inversely proportional to the square of the voltage), which is easier to do with DC (and a line from Africa to Europe needs to use DC anyway, if you want to go underwater for any significant length).
Look up Path 65, which connects the LA area to a converter station all the way north in Oregon, close to the WA border, that is more than 800 miles away. It uses +/- 500 kV DC and can carry up to 2 GW
a practicing Protestant doesn't need to study the catechism or proclamations from the Pope or the daily emissions from the Dhali Lama. It is very likely that any question not regarding Protestantism will be missed by any Protestant, and any question not Catholic in origin by Catholics, etc.
You may have had a point if the same survey I linked to in my post hadn't shown atheists to score better on Christianity than most Christians - only Mormons and white Evangelicals do better, but atheists know more about the Bible and Christianity than Catholics, mainline Protestants and all black Protestants, Evangelical or otherwise. Guess you didn't even bother to look at the evidence.
Based on the kinds of malarky I see posted here whenever a religious debate starts, I'd say that atheists have a very poor knowledge of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. They think they know, but they really don't.
So, I pointed you to a nationwide survey, using a statistically significant sample of Americans, with the method and results published for everybody to examine. Your choice is instead to declare all atheists ignorant because your gut tells you so, based on random posts on Slashdot. Something tells me you're not an atheist yourself.
Of you course, most Atheists are more ignorant than religious nut jobs. And my most Atheists, I mean only the ones that feel the need to tell the world they are atheists in order to make themselves feel superior. Anyone who comes out and starts debating something by leading their argument with critisms of someone rather than their though patterns, its certain they aren't talking about anything they actually know about.
Ironically, your post proves YOU don't know what you're talking about. Atheists are on average more knowledgeable about religion than believers. See for example this poll - and here's an excerpt, in case you don't feel like following the link:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Centerâ(TM)s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers
I'd also like to point you to the following quote, from here:
American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.
"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."
Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.
First, you obviously don't believe in or understand the concept of free will.
It seems to me YOU don't understand the concept of free will, nor do you understand logic. Let me explain:
The free will argument is trotted out by believers anytime they're confronted with the contradictions in their world model. In this particular case, you're arguing that the freedom of making a choice is paramount, even if the result is eternal damnation - God can not put limits to your free will, even in order to save you from the lake of fire. This argument (and variants) is completely bogus:
First, there is no such thing as "unlimited free will". Just look at the world you live in! Can you choose of your own free will to fly like a bird? No, you can't, even though you're making a free choice, and are ready to assume the consequences. Your exercise of your free will is limited by the laws of nature (laws created, in your model, directly by God). So God DOES put hard limits on your free will, all the time. This clearly contradicts your argument.
Second, if there was a God, he doesn't care about your choices anyway. Do you think many people choose of their own free will to get sick, or old, and die? And yet, despite all the "free will" propaganda from believers, all those choices are ignored.
Third, the game as you describe it is loaded anyway - people are asked to buy a cat in a bag, to "believe" all kinds of absurdities, and if they dare question they're thrown in a lake of fire for eternity. Geeze, can you imagine a more sadistic act? And what burns me is that some people call that "God's love", or "perfect justice".
How much of a paradise would heaven be if you were forced there against your own will?
That's just silly. Nobody (or let's say very few people) would refuse to go to heaven if they had the choice. That is, however, a PROPER choice, not the loaded "faith" religions deal. If there was a God that really loved people, he'd just show himself, prove his existence, and get everybody saved. The"faith" thing is something Madoff needs, not God.
Tell me how many Religions you find in China today, or Russia today. Wholly shit that's a short list huh?
Well, the article here tells us that in China we can find:
- Taoism (with variants)
- Buddhism (with variants)
- Confucianism
- a variety of Chinese folk religions (globally named Shenism)
- a variety of non-Han folk religions, like Moz or Dongbaism (usually polytheistic, animistic and shamanistic)
- Christianity (of all usual flavors, Catholic, Protestant and even some Orthodox Christians)
- Islam
- Judaism
- Hinduism
- A variety of new sects and religions, perhaps the best known being Falun Gong
I won't bother listing all religious flavors in Russia (find them here), but there are even more diverse than in China - there are tens of thousands of various religious organizations, belonging to such diverse religions as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, even Zoroastrianism and Tolstoyism (!).
Those look like huge lists to me, so what was your point again?
I know laser beams diffract but I didn't think they spread out
They do spread out, but the divergence angle is really small, and it also depends on the type of laser - some of them don't produce very well focused light.
To understand why it helps to look at a simplified laser design, like the one diagrammed here, which uses a crystal rod for the resonating cavity (YAG in the diagram, or ruby in Maiman's original laser). The active medium is pumped by the flash lamp, and photons are generated randomly in the body of the crystal rod. Most of them exit immediately through the sides. Some happen to be emitted almost parallel to the long axis of the rod, and they get reflected by the mirrored ends. Most of those, emitted at a slight angle, end up exiting through the sides as well (maybe after a few reflections). A few happen to be moving very close to parallel to the axis, and get reflected between the mirrors again and again. Those photons cross the active medium many times and generate a lot of other photons with the same wavelength and phase (that's what's called "the LASER effect"). In the end, when some of them exit through the semi-transparent mirror at the end of the rod, they have ALMOST the same direction. That makes the laser ray so collimated, but a very small amount of divergence will still be present.
This is really a vacuum tube if you add a high dose of immagination. Really
Well, maybe not so much a classic vacuum tube, since electrons are generated through field electron emission, not thermionic effect. It does look similar to some cold cathode devices though, like neon lamps or maybe plasma display cells. The interesting parts are the very small size and the addition of the gate which allows modulation of the electron flow.
Makes me wonder if tunneling plays a part here
Maybe a bit, but AFAIR electron tunnelling happens at really small scales, in the sub-nanometer range, maybe up to a few nanometers. The gap mentioned in the article is 150 nm, two orders of magnitude above that - which would make the probability of quantum tunnelling through the gap extremely small.
Investment income is the reward you get by risking your money by investing in a business. Investing in a business gives them capital to buy assets and hire employees. It is not something that should be discouraged, unless your myopia extends to economics.
But the real engine for progress is work, not investment money. Capital by itself doesn't do anything without somebody to use it. However, the people actually doing the work are taxed more on their income than the people who provide the capital, even though they're the actual real creators.
Nobody denies investment is necessary. I don't however think it's economically or morally superior to live from investments rather that do good honest work. That's why I think taxing income from investment less than income from work is a bad moral choice, and provides all the wrong incentives for society. I mean, what would happen if capital income would be taxed equally to income from work, or perhaps even more? Would the rich stop investing, would they be, as you say, "discouraged"? This won't happen, or they'll lose their capital to inflation. What will happen is more money would go to the real creators, who would then be able to create more - or maybe some of the formerly idle rich would have to enter the work market themselves and actually become productive. Either way the society would be better off, so I can't really see where the bad part is.
international law does not provide for the existence of individuals without a citizenship.
That's completely and utterly false. Look up stateless person. International law has recognized this situation since the time of the League of Nations, long before the existence of the UN. There are a number of UN conventions that deal with stateless persons - see this one, from 1954, or the more specific one, dated 1961 here.
Slashdot Mirror
the great short, A Rose For Ecclesiastes
Yeah, great story! I'd also like to mention "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth", which is almost as good.
Come on we all know that Terry did his best work with Neil Gaiman.
Good Omens was right up there with anything Douglas Adams ever did, and I loved his books
Heh, that's quite a backhanded compliment; Pratchett at his best is a much better writer than Adams ever was. Don't misunderstand me: I like Adams. He's clever, often very funny, and has a real talent for the quotable quip. But his books (in particular the HGTTG series) are little more than collections of gags. The plot is negligible, just a skeleton to hang the jokes from, the characters are cartoonish, there is hardly any development. This said, Adams was evolving, growing in experience - as you can see in the Dirk Gently books. It's a tragedy he died before reaching his peak as a writer.
Now, if you only read the first few Pratchett books (or even a few more from the Rincewind the Wizzard series) you'd be justified thinking he's just a fantasy-oriented imitator of Adams. But Pratchett developed a lot over the years. His later books have complex plots and are often built around important ideas and concepts that leave you thinking. Pratchett is also a master of characterization - with a few sentences he creates a distinctive character you often recognize from the real world. And he manages that without losing the fun - you still get those laugh out loud moments. But I think what makes him special is that, while never blind to their quirks and defects, he loves people and his characters. I'd call that wisdom.
Who has root access to every web server in the world to see if they're tracking visitors or not? Remember, tracking is not limited to cookies.
Strawman, and not a very good one either. You don't need access to "every web server in the world". The solution I proposed solves the bulk of the problem: large trackers will be recognized and blacklisted, precisely because they're large. A number of small trackers may avoid blacklisting, but the only way to do that is to remain small, and thus not much of a nuisance. And cookies have nothing to do with my argument, so I don't really know where this comes from.
Who decides which forms of tracking are tracking and which are "tracking"?
Who decides which sites are tracking you and which are not?
Who maintains the list?
You really haven't read the message you're replying to, have you? I touched on those things in my previous post; however, here it is again: the user has the choice (as opposed to Google's proposal, where the choice is with the ad tracker). He can decide a site is malicious or not, based on whatever criteria he deems important. I expect though that relatively knowledgeable users who don't want to be too bothered will subscribe to a tracker list published by a trusted organization of his choice. And for the average user, Microsoft or Apple or other browser developer can provide a default blacklist automatically updated.
Who pays for it?
What payment are you talking about? The tracker's? The point is exactly that lots of people will stop unwillingly or unknowingly paying the trackers (with their information, that is). Maybe you're talking about the publishers of tracking lists? I assume some may offer the tracking list as a paid service, and if they're good some users may choose to pay. But I'd like to introduce you to this concept of "free software" - look it up, it may surprise you. In the same spirit as free software, I'm pretty sure there'll be lots of community supported tracker lists that users can subscribe to.
There is no way to "not even connect to a tracker's web site" because websites who would ignore DNT would be the same websites who don't provide / lie about their privacy policy.
Of course there is; it's called a blacklist. Knowledgeable people or organizations can identify trackers, and publish up to date lists. Some of us are already doing this, using the h***s file (I hope I don't wake up any trolls), but it's not easy for the average user. The browser should have a built in blacklisting facility and especially a mechanism for easy or, better, automatic updating of the blacklist. The user should get a default list (maybe updateable via Windows or Apple update or similar mechanisms), but he should also be able to choose a trusted organization (like the EFF) and subscribe to updated lists of trackers.
With this design, when some web page includes a link pointing to a web bug in the tracker's domain, my browser will just ignore it. With Google's design, the browser will go grab the bug, and ask the (unknown, untrusted, and probably not in the EU, so not covered by their laws) tracker to be kind and lose money on this transaction. I really don't think it'll work.
This will effectively KILL the do-not-track project.
Good. The do-not-track project as designed by Mozilla and Google is worthless, and I'm reasonably sure it's intentionally broken. It's just trusting the web site to agree to your browser's plea to please not track it; there is no enforcement mechanism, and no way to even know your request is honored or not. A proper design would not even connect to a tracker's web site.
Of course, Google has a major conflict of interest in this - tracking people is what makes them the big money; that's why I suspect Mozilla and Google came up with this "design", pretending to care about privacy while aware that many users aren't knowledgeable or caring enough to set the DNT flag, and also on the fact that when push comes to shove they can just ignore the "don't track" request. Microsoft is pretty much calling their bluff there.
Energy is getting more and more expensive every day.
Short term, maybe. Long term the trend is definitely the other way round. And compared to the growth of individual income and resources, energy is definitely getting cheaper. Just consider how much energy we can afford to use for everyday things, like driving to the mall or keeping our houses warm. Think how much somebody who lived a hundred or more years ago would have to pay to get the same amount of energy.
One implies being intelligent is just luck in the bilogy dice roll. The other implies you can change your intelligence through some sort of effort.
Prof Nemur said but why did you want to lern to reed and spell in the frist place. I tolld him because all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnians class at the school I ferget alot.
Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus. He said you know Charlie we are not shure how this experamint will werk on pepul because we onley tried it up to now on animils. I said thats what Miss Kinnian tolld me but I dont even care if it herts or anything because Im strong and I will werk hard.
I want to get smart if they will let me.
The badges for full time employees, vendors and contractors have differently colored borders; look for "blue badge" here or here
the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers
And that made a big difference in the cultures and politics of the two; the South was focused on agriculture, mainly cotton, and failed to develop a diversified industry. Slavery also led to a more highly stratified society, where large slaveholders held a majority of the wealth and the middle class was much smaller and less powerful than in the North. One of the effects of the concentration of political power into the hands of the big plantation owners was the smaller government and lower levels of taxation in the South. Import tarrifs were also low, because Southern manufacturing was so backwards and oriented towards the needs of farmers that most of the industrial products had to be imported. As a result, the quality and availability of public education were low, leading to widespread illiteracy. Those trends produced a conservative society, oriented towards the past, with little interest in science or progress.
Thinking about it, It's surprising how many of those same differences between the (broadly defined) US North and South cultures are still there today.
Many companies make money by making free stuff. Here are a few: Red Hat, Canonical, Facebook
But the product of Facebook is not the website, and neither are the Linux distros the final products of Red Hat or Canonical. It's like saying a fishing company gives the bait away free. The bait or the code are just production costs, expenses required in order to create their product. For Red Hat the product is support, sold to companies, and for Facebook the product is you, sold to advertisers.
Prosperity and economic growth come from more efficient production of goods and services
Don't forget distribution though. If the current trends continue, most of the extra prosperity brought by productivity growth will be concentrated to a relatively small percentage of the population. If this happens, the total output may be larger but many people could conceivably do worse then they do now.
For purposes of this discussion it pretty much does. Consider the other two options, Apple's OS X products are close enough in complexity to Windows to drop their tiny market share into the same bucket and traditional desktop Linux certainly isn't for the 'only needed a tablet' crowd
You're still not making sense. People bought PCs because they needed the services a PC provided - mail, browsing, development, games, business and so on. Nowadays a lot of those services are available via other platforms - smartphones for mail and web browsing, smartphones and consoles for gaming, clouds for business, so, obviously the global sales of PCs will grow less or even stop growing. That has very little to do with the OS, and nothing to do with Microsoft. The fact that you felt compelled to inject Microsoft in the discussion shows a problem with you: either you're trolling or else your reasoning capacities are completely warped.
Capitalism would do a better job with education, housing and healthcare if government would stop introducing massive distortions in the market.
Nothing in this sentence is even remotely true; you're just reciting right-wing dogma. On housing, weren't you awake in 2008 when the lifting of regulations on capitalism caused the huge housing meltdown? On health care, aren't you aware that the least socialized American health care system costs the most and performs the worst of all developed nations? On education, don't you know that the completely government funded education systems in places like Finland deliver vastly better results than the much less regulated US school system? Maybe you should look sometimes at the real world around you and check whether what happens matches your conceptions. And if they don't, maybe reconsider them.
But I do agree with the other complaints about it having gendered nouns; that's my biggest complaint about it, but again that seems to be a feature of every European language except English for some reason. I'm not a linguist, but I am curious where those ever came from, and why anyone ever thought they'd be a good idea instead of simply confusing.
The reason is that most European languages descend from Indo-European and have inherited gendered nouns from their common ancestor. In early Proto-Indo-European nouns had two genders, animate and inanimate (kind of like modern Basque, I'm told); the animate gender split later into the better known feminine and masculine, and the inanimate gender evolved into the neuter, thus providing the well known Indo-European three genders.
Many descendant languages have lost the neuter, and are left with masculine and feminine, and English lost even this split (remaining only with vestigial traces, like the he/she/it pronouns). Other modern descendants have kept the full three genders (Latin, Greek, German, Romanian, some Slavic languages)
German IS great
Mark Twain wouldn't agree (see some of his thoughts on German here); just a short quotation for edification:
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it.
Jokes aside, German has a great advantage over English (even Mark Twain agrees): it's spelling is much closer to phonemic.
then the spec is worse than useless
The story is a bit weirder; last year three competing proposals for do not track mechanisms (from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft) were submitted to W3C. The proposal accepted by the W3C was Mozilla's, despite the fact that it's completely broken. I can't understand why it was even proposed, and even less why the W3C chose it over better alternatives. That bad design is what the kerfuffle is about now: W3C and Mozilla have realized their protocol is not worth a damn, and that ad servers will just ignore it, but, for reasons I also can't understand, neither of them would just fix the issue; instead they attack Microsoft for once doing the right thing for users.
Quick explanation of the reason why I say the Mozilla/Google proposals were dodgy: they both rely on individual tracking sites (or, for Google, ad networks) behaving nicely - and in the real world I wouldn't expect all tracking networks, who make their money from getting as much data as they can about users, to put being nice above the almighty dollar. Neither design has a mechanism for enforcing the user's choice for non-cooperative sites, no matter how egregiously they break the rules.
Microsoft's design was technically better: their proposal had teeth, and didn't trust the ad providers. Instead it used tracking lists (kind of global kill files) to identify sites that track you, and stopped the browser from contacting the malicious sites altogether. The tracking lists could be put together by third parties, and the user could choose which lists to use, so the choice was the user's.
The Register has (in the article I linked to above) an interesting quote from Mozilla's privacy officer, Sid Stamm: "Advertisements are a constructive part of the Web ecosystem, and we think blocking ads outright is too detrimental to the Web; instead, we would like to pursue a solution where users and advertising networks can work in concert (instead of in conflict) to balance value with consumers' privacy choices." That quote, coming from somebody who's job description should be to care about the user's privacy, is quite worrying. It could be interpreted to show the weakness in Mozilla's proposed standard was intentional; either way, I believe it was the wrong decision at the time, and that Mozilla's opposition today to MS's opt-in choice is wrong as well.
Resistivity of materials is not solved by switching to DC
That's true; the solution is to also increase the voltage (losses are inversely proportional to the square of the voltage), which is easier to do with DC (and a line from Africa to Europe needs to use DC anyway, if you want to go underwater for any significant length).
Look up Path 65, which connects the LA area to a converter station all the way north in Oregon, close to the WA border, that is more than 800 miles away. It uses +/- 500 kV DC and can carry up to 2 GW
a practicing Protestant doesn't need to study the catechism or proclamations from the Pope or the daily emissions from the Dhali Lama. It is very likely that any question not regarding Protestantism will be missed by any Protestant, and any question not Catholic in origin by Catholics, etc.
You may have had a point if the same survey I linked to in my post hadn't shown atheists to score better on Christianity than most Christians - only Mormons and white Evangelicals do better, but atheists know more about the Bible and Christianity than Catholics, mainline Protestants and all black Protestants, Evangelical or otherwise. Guess you didn't even bother to look at the evidence.
Based on the kinds of malarky I see posted here whenever a religious debate starts, I'd say that atheists have a very poor knowledge of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. They think they know, but they really don't.
So, I pointed you to a nationwide survey, using a statistically significant sample of Americans, with the method and results published for everybody to examine. Your choice is instead to declare all atheists ignorant because your gut tells you so, based on random posts on Slashdot. Something tells me you're not an atheist yourself.
Of you course, most Atheists are more ignorant than religious nut jobs. And my most Atheists, I mean only the ones that feel the need to tell the world they are atheists in order to make themselves feel superior. Anyone who comes out and starts debating something by leading their argument with critisms of someone rather than their though patterns, its certain they aren't talking about anything they actually know about.
Ironically, your post proves YOU don't know what you're talking about. Atheists are on average more knowledgeable about religion than believers. See for example this poll - and here's an excerpt, in case you don't feel like following the link:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Centerâ(TM)s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers
I'd also like to point you to the following quote, from here:
American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.
"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."
Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.
First, you obviously don't believe in or understand the concept of free will.
It seems to me YOU don't understand the concept of free will, nor do you understand logic. Let me explain:
The free will argument is trotted out by believers anytime they're confronted with the contradictions in their world model. In this particular case, you're arguing that the freedom of making a choice is paramount, even if the result is eternal damnation - God can not put limits to your free will, even in order to save you from the lake of fire. This argument (and variants) is completely bogus:
First, there is no such thing as "unlimited free will". Just look at the world you live in! Can you choose of your own free will to fly like a bird? No, you can't, even though you're making a free choice, and are ready to assume the consequences. Your exercise of your free will is limited by the laws of nature (laws created, in your model, directly by God). So God DOES put hard limits on your free will, all the time. This clearly contradicts your argument.
Second, if there was a God, he doesn't care about your choices anyway. Do you think many people choose of their own free will to get sick, or old, and die? And yet, despite all the "free will" propaganda from believers, all those choices are ignored.
Third, the game as you describe it is loaded anyway - people are asked to buy a cat in a bag, to "believe" all kinds of absurdities, and if they dare question they're thrown in a lake of fire for eternity. Geeze, can you imagine a more sadistic act? And what burns me is that some people call that "God's love", or "perfect justice".
How much of a paradise would heaven be if you were forced there against your own will?
That's just silly. Nobody (or let's say very few people) would refuse to go to heaven if they had the choice. That is, however, a PROPER choice, not the loaded "faith" religions deal. If there was a God that really loved people, he'd just show himself, prove his existence, and get everybody saved. The"faith" thing is something Madoff needs, not God.
Tell me how many Religions you find in China today, or Russia today. Wholly shit that's a short list huh?
Well, the article here tells us that in China we can find:
- Taoism (with variants)
- Buddhism (with variants)
- Confucianism
- a variety of Chinese folk religions (globally named Shenism)
- a variety of non-Han folk religions, like Moz or Dongbaism (usually polytheistic, animistic and shamanistic)
- Christianity (of all usual flavors, Catholic, Protestant and even some Orthodox Christians)
- Islam
- Judaism
- Hinduism
- A variety of new sects and religions, perhaps the best known being Falun Gong
I won't bother listing all religious flavors in Russia (find them here), but there are even more diverse than in China - there are tens of thousands of various religious organizations, belonging to such diverse religions as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, even Zoroastrianism and Tolstoyism (!).
Those look like huge lists to me, so what was your point again?
I know laser beams diffract but I didn't think they spread out
They do spread out, but the divergence angle is really small, and it also depends on the type of laser - some of them don't produce very well focused light.
To understand why it helps to look at a simplified laser design, like the one diagrammed here, which uses a crystal rod for the resonating cavity (YAG in the diagram, or ruby in Maiman's original laser). The active medium is pumped by the flash lamp, and photons are generated randomly in the body of the crystal rod. Most of them exit immediately through the sides. Some happen to be emitted almost parallel to the long axis of the rod, and they get reflected by the mirrored ends. Most of those, emitted at a slight angle, end up exiting through the sides as well (maybe after a few reflections). A few happen to be moving very close to parallel to the axis, and get reflected between the mirrors again and again. Those photons cross the active medium many times and generate a lot of other photons with the same wavelength and phase (that's what's called "the LASER effect"). In the end, when some of them exit through the semi-transparent mirror at the end of the rod, they have ALMOST the same direction. That makes the laser ray so collimated, but a very small amount of divergence will still be present.
This is really a vacuum tube if you add a high dose of immagination. Really
Well, maybe not so much a classic vacuum tube, since electrons are generated through field electron emission, not thermionic effect. It does look similar to some cold cathode devices though, like neon lamps or maybe plasma display cells. The interesting parts are the very small size and the addition of the gate which allows modulation of the electron flow.
Makes me wonder if tunneling plays a part here
Maybe a bit, but AFAIR electron tunnelling happens at really small scales, in the sub-nanometer range, maybe up to a few nanometers. The gap mentioned in the article is 150 nm, two orders of magnitude above that - which would make the probability of quantum tunnelling through the gap extremely small.
Investment income is the reward you get by risking your money by investing in a business. Investing in a business gives them capital to buy assets and hire employees.
It is not something that should be discouraged, unless your myopia extends to economics.
But the real engine for progress is work, not investment money. Capital by itself doesn't do anything without somebody to use it. However, the people actually doing the work are taxed more on their income than the people who provide the capital, even though they're the actual real creators.
Nobody denies investment is necessary. I don't however think it's economically or morally superior to live from investments rather that do good honest work. That's why I think taxing income from investment less than income from work is a bad moral choice, and provides all the wrong incentives for society. I mean, what would happen if capital income would be taxed equally to income from work, or perhaps even more? Would the rich stop investing, would they be, as you say, "discouraged"? This won't happen, or they'll lose their capital to inflation. What will happen is more money would go to the real creators, who would then be able to create more - or maybe some of the formerly idle rich would have to enter the work market themselves and actually become productive. Either way the society would be better off, so I can't really see where the bad part is.
international law does not provide for the existence of individuals without a citizenship.
That's completely and utterly false. Look up stateless person. International law has recognized this situation since the time of the League of Nations, long before the existence of the UN. There are a number of UN conventions that deal with stateless persons - see this one, from 1954, or the more specific one, dated 1961 here.