I wonder about a deeper issue though. Why do we have a 'religion' status at all? As far as I'm concerned freedom of religion is a subset of freedom of speech and churches should be operating under the legal framework of a for-profit or non-profit organization, with all it's legal requirements.
I absolutely do not see the need to support organizations selling a fictional* story with extra constitutional or any other legal protections apart from what they are already awarded like everyone else. In my opinion the world would undoubtably be a better place without religion, but I'm not going to advocate a position where people are in a legal disadvantage because of their beliefs that I think are incorrect. However that goes the other way too, I don't want to see them get extra protections just because they title their beliefs as religion.
Scientology, as a pyramid scheme would be illegal under normal operating practices in most countries, which is exactly like it should be.
*Even if you are religious, you consider fiction the 2000 OTHER religions.
ar.my, pl armies*:
1. a large organized body of men too stupid to realise that they are risking their lives to enforce the will of their political elite, instead of assuring the defense of their country.
Canadian, Australian, Indian, Irish and NZ army exempted from the definition. Other countries have different purpose, names and definitions (in their own native tongue) for their countries' military force.
The argument that "yay more sunshine, more warmth, what's the fuss, party!" is generally not considered a serious one.
Although arguing based on authority is something I don't usually do, but in the case of global warming most common people just display ignorance about the matter. That in itself is not a problem, but writing articles proclaiming truths which show signs that the guy didn't even bother to do basic research is bad. I wish people would try to inform themselves before trying to form the opinions of others.
Science is complex, deal with it. Naive, overly simplistic ideas set off my bullshit alarm, like in the case of "paranormal" stuff.
...why post it? I can find similar trolls with little or no effort too, but usually I'm here for a honest discussion. It is not like this article would be news in itself.
If the linux kernel people would ignore vulnerabilities, downplay them, take months for them to produce a fix, merge distinct vulnerabilities into single advisories and finally try to claim improved security, then I'd guess I would want to see stories about it on slashdot. So what bias?
Asking computers to be easy is like asking a fucking particle accelerator to be easy to operate and understand and being able to analyze the results. The computer uses a lot of mathematics, physics and it's a very complex piece of engineering equipment. You can't reduce the amount of knowledge required without distorting the (general purpose) functionality of the computer, it is a "lossy compression". The car analogies doesn't matter because cars are built to do one thing: provide motorized transportation. Computers on their very basic level are built to do one thing: store and calculate with numbers. It is a huge level of abstraction that I'm being able to type this post in reply to yours at the moment.
In other words, like maths, computers have a bare minimum of knowledge that is required to operate them sufficiently. That bare minimum is much more than 99% of the common users know. Still, in case of mathematics when faced with the fact that you need to learn advanced maths for numerical analysys, you don't try to dumb it down to the primary school's first class's level, because you can't. You can't do that in the case of computers either. So either we accept the situation and try to deal with the fact that most computer users don't know what is going on and try to mitigate the catastrophe by education and good policies in software design or we don't. Users will be able to have a user friendly computer if/when the holy grail: artificial intelligence gets developed, plus a few other technologies that allow for better IO than keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Use their own weapons against them! Let's learn from Turk 182 and use that same method. Who is going to be the first one to decorate MPAA property with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 ?
...what to do, but keep your grubby hands off the real operating systems that don't base their security on feel-good measures, but sound design and actually fixing things.
I think a bit of personal not-for-profit p2p downloading and an exception for life-saving drugs in OK. But, the balatant disregard for copyrights and patents with businesses in these countries openly copying and selling pharmaceuticals, software and music should be stopped.
So you're saying that just because the USA can't come up with a working economy, it resorts to hijacking a mechanism from the 18th century to try to control what every rational human being would classify as ideas that belong to everyone. Like the RIAA, the USA Govt. should learn the lesson too: come up with a working business model/economy or roll over.
The U.S. Constitution requires that the federal government respect the sovereignty of foreign nations.
Guess that worked pretty well over the last 150 or so years, where dozens of countries were trampled over by the USA, in some cases bringing chaos, violence and death to those countries.
While in the case of providing a free market you could argue that it is generally a good thing that democratic systems should have, but copyright is just a mean to an end, to try to bolster innovation. Needless to say it is a laughable 18th century relic, but nonetheless it is a tool.
Saying to another country that you're not protecting copyrights enough, is a sovereignty issue. It would be equivalent to saying that another country using this or that kind of philosophy in helping the economy is bad and should use another one. By all indications it seems that more lax copyright laws are better though, but noone should be forced to abolish or viciously protect copyright because another country demands it.
Discounting the fact that the USA demands stronger copyrights due to the corporate lobby, it is still not a rights issue. This particular watchlist stems from the fact that copyright is a mechanism that would completely break down in the countries it is still present, if more other influential or developed countries would severely weaken it's legal framework under their own sovereignty.
Jones was named dean of admissions at MIT in 1997 and received MIT's highest award for administrators, the "MIT Excellence Award for Leading Change." She was also the 2006 winner of the "Gordon Y Billard Award" given "for special service of outstanding merit" performed for the school.
Sounds like she was doing her job well. Yeah, she lied. Does it matter 28 years on?
Sadly true. Mindset can be the hardest thing to change in the world. This is how dictatorships live on, in the sociology and in the people's mind, long after they have been overturned. I'm from an Eastern European country, so I feel this firsthand. Progress is greatly hindered by the fact that at least the third of the voting population became a pensioner before or around 1990.
It is a problem, because in a lot of these people's minds there is no moral difference between the two systems. In other words, they live by the patterns they learned in the dictatorship, while enjoying the benefits of a democracy. Thing is, this doesn't really work, because they don't understand the fundamental issues of living in a democracy, like making the leadership accountable. That is the duty of everyone that lives in a democracy. This is a price we have to pay for enjoying the benefits of democracy. It is not a convenient thing to do, to carefully evaluate and then elect the best candidate and if he messes up, hold him accountable.
That was the theoretical part, but it has very real consequences and it is a very real problem. The people who spent most of their lives in a dictatorship, combined with a democrafically aging society makes a very bad match for democracy. Most of these people still evaluate parties based on who will give them the most gifts, who appellates more on the 'politics' of their youth, which was a dictatorship. They aren't troubled if some politician (dare I say prime minister) acts like as if he's still back in that dictatorship. It is the "we'll throw you some bones, just don't question the leaders" philosophy of a dictatorship. I'm sick of the way it permiates into and poisons a would be democracy through the minds of people who have suffered in the previous system.
The future is more hopeful though. The youth who didn't live in that system rejects those ideas with a big majority. The age line which divides the younger people and the more democratic parties from the old people and the ex state party is going up. Normal thinking is slowly spreading as people are born who were not poisoned by a regime.
This might not be too closely related to the MPAA, but should tell you something about the power of the mindset and it's effects.
Sadly the new system results in ugly censorship too. That is what you get when there is a monopoly like the movie industry. One arm is the ratings board, telling you what their other arm, the movie theatres and DVD stores will carry. Independents get harsher ratings which makes Walmart and the likes not carry them in some cases. The ratings board is secret (only in the USA, other rating systems in the world, something like 20 that were studied for comparison don't hide the raters). There are no standards by which the ratings board works, appeal is done in-house and is merely a formality. Jack Valenti was shown to be personally managing the ratings board, the whole ugly mess is his brainchild. It is a form of less inconvenient and public censorship. There is nothing to be hailed about it.
For further information please watch the documentary "This film is not yet rated".
Actually people have been preparing this experiment since the 1960s.
There was a great lecture about this on this year's hungarian skeptics conference, spiced with the real life experience that Hungary was part of the soviet influence sphere at that time, so when one physicist was allowed to go to the USA for a year to do research. When he came back, his colleagues were flocking him, discussing the news and that the americans are setting up this experiment. The lecturer, now an old man, can finally see the result of the experiment they were discussing more than 40 years ago.
You have a personal perspective. I have friends who have the same personal perspective. I don't have a personal perspective about this.
Young people die all the time, who had their whole life ahead of them. From a personal perspective, this is a great loss. Everyone who has had people close to him die knows and feels that. My post wasn't about the personal perspective, but about society and the government. If you want to look out for the best interests of the people, you have to get rid of the personal perspective, as it clouds judgement. My point was that from a sociological or safety viewpoint, 32 dead people in a single day due to gunshots is not exceptional. It is only seen that way because it is very rare that those 32 people died at the same place by the same killer. If you're a responsible government official, you'd only care about giving priority to saving the many instead of saving the few.
No, I've actually thought of that, but that would have been just a minor point compared to the issue. 32 deaths inconvenience the average only so slightly.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder about a deeper issue though. Why do we have a 'religion' status at all? As far as I'm concerned freedom of religion is a subset of freedom of speech and churches should be operating under the legal framework of a for-profit or non-profit organization, with all it's legal requirements.
I absolutely do not see the need to support organizations selling a fictional* story with extra constitutional or any other legal protections apart from what they are already awarded like everyone else. In my opinion the world would undoubtably be a better place without religion, but I'm not going to advocate a position where people are in a legal disadvantage because of their beliefs that I think are incorrect. However that goes the other way too, I don't want to see them get extra protections just because they title their beliefs as religion.
Scientology, as a pyramid scheme would be illegal under normal operating practices in most countries, which is exactly like it should be.
*Even if you are religious, you consider fiction the 2000 OTHER religions.
ar.my, pl armies*:
1. a large organized body of men too stupid to realise that they are risking their lives to enforce the will of their political elite, instead of assuring the defense of their country.
Canadian, Australian, Indian, Irish and NZ army exempted from the definition. Other countries have different purpose, names and definitions (in their own native tongue) for their countries' military force.
I don't write articles based on concepts I'm not an expert in.
The argument that "yay more sunshine, more warmth, what's the fuss, party!" is generally not considered a serious one.
Although arguing based on authority is something I don't usually do, but in the case of global warming most common people just display ignorance about the matter. That in itself is not a problem, but writing articles proclaiming truths which show signs that the guy didn't even bother to do basic research is bad. I wish people would try to inform themselves before trying to form the opinions of others.
Science is complex, deal with it. Naive, overly simplistic ideas set off my bullshit alarm, like in the case of "paranormal" stuff.
...why post it? I can find similar trolls with little or no effort too, but usually I'm here for a honest discussion. It is not like this article would be news in itself.
If the linux kernel people would ignore vulnerabilities, downplay them, take months for them to produce a fix, merge distinct vulnerabilities into single advisories and finally try to claim improved security, then I'd guess I would want to see stories about it on slashdot. So what bias?
Hm...I guess they leveraged the active synergies to stop the probes but the active hardening failed on the SuperHyperVista3000 edition.
Oh wait, you did expect real security instead of buzzwords?
Asking computers to be easy is like asking a fucking particle accelerator to be easy to operate and understand and being able to analyze the results. The computer uses a lot of mathematics, physics and it's a very complex piece of engineering equipment. You can't reduce the amount of knowledge required without distorting the (general purpose) functionality of the computer, it is a "lossy compression". The car analogies doesn't matter because cars are built to do one thing: provide motorized transportation. Computers on their very basic level are built to do one thing: store and calculate with numbers. It is a huge level of abstraction that I'm being able to type this post in reply to yours at the moment.
In other words, like maths, computers have a bare minimum of knowledge that is required to operate them sufficiently. That bare minimum is much more than 99% of the common users know. Still, in case of mathematics when faced with the fact that you need to learn advanced maths for numerical analysys, you don't try to dumb it down to the primary school's first class's level, because you can't. You can't do that in the case of computers either. So either we accept the situation and try to deal with the fact that most computer users don't know what is going on and try to mitigate the catastrophe by education and good policies in software design or we don't. Users will be able to have a user friendly computer if/when the holy grail: artificial intelligence gets developed, plus a few other technologies that allow for better IO than keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Kind of expected in a state of overly paranoid affairs. Paranoia is where rationality gets thrown out of the window.
"The embrace of Prussia is deadly". It was a reminder that for a long time Prussia was mostly victorious, even against former allies.
It is not a mistake that Microsoft's strategy starts with "embrace".
"Ode To A Small Lump of Green hexadecimal Putty called 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning"
Oh, the classics!
Use their own weapons against them! Let's learn from Turk 182 and use that same method. Who is going to be the first one to decorate MPAA property with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 ?
...what to do, but keep your grubby hands off the real operating systems that don't base their security on feel-good measures, but sound design and actually fixing things.
While in the case of providing a free market you could argue that it is generally a good thing that democratic systems should have, but copyright is just a mean to an end, to try to bolster innovation. Needless to say it is a laughable 18th century relic, but nonetheless it is a tool.
Saying to another country that you're not protecting copyrights enough, is a sovereignty issue. It would be equivalent to saying that another country using this or that kind of philosophy in helping the economy is bad and should use another one. By all indications it seems that more lax copyright laws are better though, but noone should be forced to abolish or viciously protect copyright because another country demands it.
Discounting the fact that the USA demands stronger copyrights due to the corporate lobby, it is still not a rights issue. This particular watchlist stems from the fact that copyright is a mechanism that would completely break down in the countries it is still present, if more other influential or developed countries would severely weaken it's legal framework under their own sovereignty.
I've been using Charts::* for my needs, these look much better. No functionality improvement, but looking better is sometimes a criteria.
Sadly true. Mindset can be the hardest thing to change in the world. This is how dictatorships live on, in the sociology and in the people's mind, long after they have been overturned. I'm from an Eastern European country, so I feel this firsthand. Progress is greatly hindered by the fact that at least the third of the voting population became a pensioner before or around 1990.
It is a problem, because in a lot of these people's minds there is no moral difference between the two systems. In other words, they live by the patterns they learned in the dictatorship, while enjoying the benefits of a democracy. Thing is, this doesn't really work, because they don't understand the fundamental issues of living in a democracy, like making the leadership accountable. That is the duty of everyone that lives in a democracy. This is a price we have to pay for enjoying the benefits of democracy. It is not a convenient thing to do, to carefully evaluate and then elect the best candidate and if he messes up, hold him accountable.
That was the theoretical part, but it has very real consequences and it is a very real problem. The people who spent most of their lives in a dictatorship, combined with a democrafically aging society makes a very bad match for democracy. Most of these people still evaluate parties based on who will give them the most gifts, who appellates more on the 'politics' of their youth, which was a dictatorship. They aren't troubled if some politician (dare I say prime minister) acts like as if he's still back in that dictatorship. It is the "we'll throw you some bones, just don't question the leaders" philosophy of a dictatorship. I'm sick of the way it permiates into and poisons a would be democracy through the minds of people who have suffered in the previous system.
The future is more hopeful though. The youth who didn't live in that system rejects those ideas with a big majority. The age line which divides the younger people and the more democratic parties from the old people and the ex state party is going up. Normal thinking is slowly spreading as people are born who were not poisoned by a regime.
This might not be too closely related to the MPAA, but should tell you something about the power of the mindset and it's effects.
Sadly the new system results in ugly censorship too. That is what you get when there is a monopoly like the movie industry. One arm is the ratings board, telling you what their other arm, the movie theatres and DVD stores will carry. Independents get harsher ratings which makes Walmart and the likes not carry them in some cases. The ratings board is secret (only in the USA, other rating systems in the world, something like 20 that were studied for comparison don't hide the raters). There are no standards by which the ratings board works, appeal is done in-house and is merely a formality. Jack Valenti was shown to be personally managing the ratings board, the whole ugly mess is his brainchild. It is a form of less inconvenient and public censorship. There is nothing to be hailed about it.
For further information please watch the documentary "This film is not yet rated".
Actually people have been preparing this experiment since the 1960s.
There was a great lecture about this on this year's hungarian skeptics conference, spiced with the real life experience that Hungary was part of the soviet influence sphere at that time, so when one physicist was allowed to go to the USA for a year to do research. When he came back, his colleagues were flocking him, discussing the news and that the americans are setting up this experiment. The lecturer, now an old man, can finally see the result of the experiment they were discussing more than 40 years ago.
You have a personal perspective. I have friends who have the same personal perspective. I don't have a personal perspective about this.
Young people die all the time, who had their whole life ahead of them. From a personal perspective, this is a great loss. Everyone who has had people close to him die knows and feels that. My post wasn't about the personal perspective, but about society and the government. If you want to look out for the best interests of the people, you have to get rid of the personal perspective, as it clouds judgement. My point was that from a sociological or safety viewpoint, 32 dead people in a single day due to gunshots is not exceptional. It is only seen that way because it is very rare that those 32 people died at the same place by the same killer. If you're a responsible government official, you'd only care about giving priority to saving the many instead of saving the few.
No, I've actually thought of that, but that would have been just a minor point compared to the issue. 32 deaths inconvenience the average only so slightly.