If a site has ads but they're not obnoxious, the non-selfish thing to do is to allow their ads so they can make some money.
No. Where do you even take that from? You make it sound as if it would be an obligation. It isn't. You put your content out there, freely accessible. You don't get to complain if I access it. Ads or no ads isn't even the point.
Let me explain from a different direction: The question changes if you ask for payment in advance. If you put up a paywall, only sell your content as a book, or even tell me up front that in order to read, I have to click on or view ads - that's a consensual deal (aka I can refuse and walk away) and I'm fine with that.
But throwing unsolicited advertisement my way and then complaining when I filter it out? Sorry, not my problem. You don't get to change the terms of the deal after the fact. If you think the deal is that I watch ads in order to read your content then do as any honest businessman does - say it up front and give me an option to say "no deal".
My adblocker simply is my way of taking back the part where I get to read and agree to the terms first. You can detect it and send me to a page that explains the deal and tells me that I need to enable ads to continue - then I can think about whether or not your site is worth being annoyed by ads or not. I have a choice, and I'll make it (and I do have the adblocker disabled for a few sites).
Not giving me the choice but simply assuming that we have a deal is what pisses me off.
They're trying to make sure readers don't steal bandwidth
And I thought we had gone too far when we called illegal copying "stealing".
Dude, nobody has stolen their bandwidth. Look, it's still there! Look!
I'm surprised Slashdot's comments section doesn't die if you block it's advertisement code.
On the contrary, if your karma is high enough, you even get an option to disable advertisement. Some sites still understand that without readers, they're nothing but a guy wanking in the basement.
Basically, if you want to be paid for your content, put up a paywall. Ads are not payment. Putting them on your site is a bet, not a price ticket. You play a bit of lottery, every ad is a ticket that may or may not yield you some cash. If your business model is based on ads, then you're a professional gambler, nothing more. Sure, with large enough numbers, statistics usually level out in your favour, but never forget that there's no guarantee - getting 100 million page views with zero ad clicks may be a statistical anomaly, but it could happen. If that means you starve, then you've bet the farm on an unreliable business model.
While I generally agree that the calm, rational approach is the right one, it also shouldn't be the only one in your repertoire. And there are times when exploding on someone is the best way to handle a matter. That is especially true if the other side is acting first, and talking after the fact. Had they talked to him before removing the poster, I dare to guess he would have been calmer.
Here's why I can relate: I live in the center of my city. There's a street filled with pubs nearby. Near the weekend, lots of people over there are drunken assholes. Sometimes, on their way home or whatever, they come through my street, and yell, fight or piss in my entrance. If I ever catch one in the act, I've sworn to myself I'll rough him up badly. Because the fact that he got that idea in the first place disqualifies him for any rational discussion, calm or otherwise. And besides, the damage is already done.
While Miller reacted strongly, it seems to me that he was in a similar situation. They had already removed the poster, and their initial notification didn't indicate they were willing to reconsider, only that they'd answer questions. From his perspective, there was no option for a solution in his interest offered, so exploding was the act by which he intended to open up the issue, so the option "put the poster back" was at least on the table. Could he have done it in a different way? Maybe. Sometimes, stating your thoughts calmly and rationally is the right thing. But sometimes, it also means you're not going to be taken seriously, and your opponent will not look for a compromise solution, but rather for a way to brush you off, exactly because you aren't loud, so you're not a thread, just a nuissance.
won't be charged if they took reasonable steps to report it
welcome to the "rat your girlfriend out to the police" state.
Here's the new Florida HOWTO take revenge on your ex-girlfriend:
a) whenever she sends you a nude pic, tell a non-existing e-mail address that looks similar to the local police about it. b) when she breaks up with you, suddenly notice your "typo" and send it to the real address. c) PROFIT - or rather, you've just reduced the number of boys she can break up with before it becomes a felony by one.
And what do I do with my Bible when you make stuff up that doesn't exist either?
You ask me for the source, of course. I'll provide it, and you'll apologize.:-)
My greatest issue with the Neo-Athiest movement is that they insist on a radical fundamentalist reading of the Bible, which they then deplore.
You are misunderstanding the intent. We do not want people to read the bible in a radical interpretation, what we point out in doing so is that people are picking and choosing from what on the other hand they declare to be a holy book. How can you say on the one hand that this is a special book containing the greatest of wisdom that is true by the pure fact of being written there, and on the other hand discard whole sections of it? If christians would treat the bible as, say, a collection of folk tales, we wouldn't rub your faces in it so much. But if you insist that, say, the 10 Commandments are the ultimate list of moral guidelines because they are the word of god, then you have to explain why putting witches to death isn't of the same category, because it is in the same holy bible (Exodus 22:18).
"If you can't spot my country from my words, then maybe it doesn't matter?"
And yet me being an American does matter?
By the same logic - if your words make a typical american trait obvious then yes, I will point it out. No, I'm not Canadian. I'm not dodging the matter, I'm pointing out that some nations have such a typical attitude that you can spot them and some don't. And I enjoy being guessed at, because it's funny. Especially with americans - when I was in Indiana many years ago, people thought I'd be from Australia. Both are a couple thousand kilometers away from Germany.:-)
but try a little pride.
We tried that half a century ago and it led us into war. Maybe you could learn something from us regarding that pride thing? It seems to be doing the same thing for you.
Hmm, I suggest a room full of Jesuits.
Gladly. Send them over whenever you find them. I enjoy a good discussion, and I prefer professional opponents over incompetent allies.
No - I have seen too many people that use them and MythBusters as proof. Scary bad stuff IMHO.
True, I have to agree on that. MythBusters as good entertainment and it's a "sciency" approach (especially that they do re-test things if viewers point out flaws, that alone is a huge one), but it's not solid science, which is largely boring. And "Bullshit" (which I've watched all episodes of) is provocative, entertaining and often revealing, but I wouldn't base an argument on it without doing some research myself.
The word "combatant" appears 0 times in it. The closest Article 3 comes to something similiar is "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities".
However, I must correct myself. The actual term used by the Bush administration was "unlawful combatant". Which makes no difference here, but does when you look into the Hague conventions, because the term "combatant" actually does appear there, but the term "unlawful combatant" does not.
Applying game theory is always an interesting approach.
However, this one misses what I consider an extremely important part: The multiplayer aspect. If obscurity is a part of your defense strategy, you can not cooperate with other defenders. As your are competing with the attacker, that means obscurity is only advantageous if the additional cost to the attacker is higher than the benefit you could gain from such cooperation. In general, your security mechanism will not be so new, innovative and hard to crack that this is true. It does depend on the size and resources of your organisation, though. If you're a large organisation that can keep a secret (say, a secret service), it could have a net advantage. For almost everyone else, though, having more eyes on the problem will generally provide a better solution than the additional difficulty that obscurity provides for the attacker.
Between the version number / release cycle insanity and this, I think it's finally time to switch. What a shame, I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. But the update today broke another extension, and building 3D into the browser is a sign of insanity that I thought we had wiped out with the demise of VMRL.
Dear Mozilla developers: If it's not something the majority of your users are going to actually use, it belongs into an extension or a plugin. Also, there are already several 3D engines with Firefox plugins, with years of experience in the field, because you don't build a good engine in a lazy summer. So with all due respect, what the fuck are you thinking?
I'm afraid you've fallen into the way-too-common bloatware trap: Not realizing when your product is feature complete and what it needs is polishing, not more stuff bolted on. There's enough CSS3 and HTML5 support still missing, for example.
I know Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source, but, according to its list there was no formal declaration of war. There were military operations sanctioned by congress.
More importantly, however, the guy killed here was not a member of any armed forces. By every international law or rules of conflict I'm aware of, he was a civilian or at most a guerilla fighter.
Please don't use the term "enemy combatant" when talking to me. That term is pure Newspeak and its purpose is to circumvent the Geneva Convention.
The terrorists have won. The US has become like them - killing its perceived enemies without evidence, trail or verdict has now become the official modus operandi. Tell me, what difference remains between you and them?
a) Congress has not actually declared war. The 5th explicitly says "War", not "military operations". Bush went to great lengths to fight a war without it being a war.
b) You can't declare war on a "group". War by definition is an armed conflict between states or nations.
Now I do agree with you in principle that in war we don't consider courts and legal details for the enemy leadership, we view them as military targets. The problem isn't that you're not right - in principle. The problem is that the US government has been playing dirty with those principles. You can't ignore them when you like and then base your arguments on them when it's convenient. Either you play by the rules, or you don't get to appeal to the rules.
I don't even worry about small or young-looking adults - the main problem with this kind of access restriction is that it may work nice for clear cases (your 9 year old son trying to access 18+ content). But it is guaranteed to fail when the required and real age are close together. Extreme case: You don't really look that much different one day before and one day after your birthday.
You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.
You're also paying for it being a little higher in quality than your average cheapest-component-everywhere bargain PC. If you compare the average Mac to a comparable quality brand PC, the difference is much less than your above.
I don't mind paying a premium for something that's worth it, but I hate it how the PC fanboys distort the numbers. Yes, Apple is more expensive. No, the difference isn't 30-40%, that's just ridiculous. You can't compare a product against its cheapest competitor and then claim it's that much more expensive than all its competitors. At least get your math right and use an average. And you can't compare an off-the-shelf product with building one yourself, unless you price in your time as well - what you're doing is comparing a product to the sum price of its components. I'm sure the car you're driving is also a lot more expensive than it would be if you'd bought all the parts and assembled it yourself.
Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"
Because that's implementation details that the judge doesn't and shouldn't care about. If they want to remove the content that way, he'll decide whether or not that's good enough to count as compliance. But the job of the judge is to decide what should be done, not how.
But the book itself doesn't, and that leaves people the option to apply it today, in whatever form they wish, which is the root cause for religious fundamentalists. If you declare that the nigger next door is your slave today, we can point at the laws saying that it ain't so. If you kill a gay guy and point to the bible telling you that's what you ought to be doing, we can't tell you that Appendix C or Amendment 12 overrules that, because they don't exist. The best we can do is remind you that you should've stoned him to death instead of shooting him.
Nice dig at the US though, I did notice you never put up your own country for me to point out its foibles, I am sure that was an oversight on your part though.
Neither did you. Funny how americans are immediately obvious as such when they talk. If you can't spot my country from my words, then maybe it doesn't matter?
"but we wouldn't put "love your parents" on the same list as "don't kill people just because" today." Why not?
Because in todays western society, parents aren't vital for survival anymore. You can do without. It's not as comfortable, but it's possible.
Then you might want to start actually talking to clergy rather than lay people.
Been there, done that, remain unimpressed. Except for one thing: These guys do get excellent training in fields most of society doesn't consider important anymore, such as rhetorics. Real ones, not the crap they teach in business school to improve your presentations.
And you are going to use Penn and Teller for proof?
For what? I was quoting something they said I liked. You're really fishing for counter-arguments here.:-)
The Bible has withstood nearly 4000 years of peer review,
Errr what? Now you're appropriating terms. There is nothing whatsoever that is "peer review" about what happened to the bible. You need to read up on what "peer review" really means.
your biggest enemy isn't the physical medium, it's not being able to read it. You have to go to great lengths to read a floppy disc from 20 years ago today, and quite possibly even greater to make sense of the data you find (jpeg is from 1992, your old images on that floppy are definitely using some other format. If you're lucky, it's something like PCX that's at least documented.
Honestly, the low-tech solution is to stop worrying and make a regular appointment in your calendar every five years or so to move everything to a new storage. You're talking about storing something for 10, 20 years, you can afford to spend half an hour waiting for a disc copy every few years, can't you?
And when you do that, you can check that OS X 10.15, codename LolCat, can still read the formats you used. And if not, converting it then will be a lot easier than it would be another five years down the road.
I dare say that 4000 years ago, we had more freedom, except for when people were actually enslaved. Now, we are enslaved by the governments we've created to be our masters. Nothing has really changed other than we've obfuscated the truth, there still is slavery, as we all are forced to work for our master.
Actually, the meaning of "freedom" has also changed over times, more than once. And discussing the concept of "freedom" can't work well if you don't make sure everyone means the same thing.
For much of human history, people had less laws and less police, but the punishments were much harsher, and your opportunities much reduced. Often, surviving the next winter was your primary concern. Very often, leaving the village you were born in was a major event. During the middle ages, the majority of peasants never went more than about 10 miles from the place they were born during their entire lives.
So depending on your exact definition of "freedom", our ancestors could have had more (less rules to follow, less surveillance) or less (fewer opportunities, less clemency on minor transgressions, fewer ways to stop injustice) - and possibly both at the same time.
We have? Besides slavery being in our Constitution?
Not in mine. Oh, you're american. Sorry. Let me spell out the obvious: The US Constitution applies to the USA, not to the rest of the world. But one way or the other, slavery is abolished in the western world. See, the legal system is also one that changes over time.
Women are paid as well as men and never discriminated against? Parents aren't important, besides student test scores correlating with parent involvement? Well, I will let the rest of the world know.
Stop thinking in binary. Sure, we don't have 100% equality yet, but what remains is complaining about details if you compare it to the biblical attitude of the woman as a mans property. And sure, parents still are important, always will - but we wouldn't put "love your parents" on the same list as "don't kill people just because" today.
Which is like rolling your own distro using linuxfromscratch.com and then claiming that Debian is pointless to learn about because 'anyone can do it'
You've missed the main point again. Debian also changes over time. If Debian had been set in stone in 2001 and never changed since then, I'd definitely prefer rolling my own instead of using it today.
People spend (and have spent) lifetimes studying it and its triumphs and failures.
People have also spent lifetimes arguing the fine details of the ether, astrology, the norse gods, whether or not the earth is flat, how big exactly the little lights that are pinned on the semiglobe that spans the sky are, and many other things that later turned out to be entirely irrelevant.
You gloss over the book and then complain about those that gloss over it as well.
Actually, I've had the astonishing find that I've read a lot more of the bible than most of those who claim to be believers in it.
As Pen & Teller put it very well: Read the bible, we need more atheists. Really read it, including the long list of people you are supposed to kill for being witches, homosexuals, unfaithful women or some other unimaginably horrible crime. Then tell me again how a book that tells you to wipe out an entire nation and rape all its women is a great source of moral teachings.
And that is such a deep insight that you need to praise the rest of the book over it? Come on, a five-year-old can come up with that piece of wisdom. "Men are flawed" - no, really? Who would've thought...
Slashdot Mirror
that crowds out other people.
Yes. But crowding out != stealing.
upstream may charge them
Yes. But increased costs != stealing.
If a site has ads but they're not obnoxious, the non-selfish thing to do is to allow their ads so they can make some money.
No. Where do you even take that from? You make it sound as if it would be an obligation. It isn't. You put your content out there, freely accessible. You don't get to complain if I access it. Ads or no ads isn't even the point.
Let me explain from a different direction: The question changes if you ask for payment in advance. If you put up a paywall, only sell your content as a book, or even tell me up front that in order to read, I have to click on or view ads - that's a consensual deal (aka I can refuse and walk away) and I'm fine with that.
But throwing unsolicited advertisement my way and then complaining when I filter it out? Sorry, not my problem. You don't get to change the terms of the deal after the fact. If you think the deal is that I watch ads in order to read your content then do as any honest businessman does - say it up front and give me an option to say "no deal".
My adblocker simply is my way of taking back the part where I get to read and agree to the terms first. You can detect it and send me to a page that explains the deal and tells me that I need to enable ads to continue - then I can think about whether or not your site is worth being annoyed by ads or not. I have a choice, and I'll make it (and I do have the adblocker disabled for a few sites).
Not giving me the choice but simply assuming that we have a deal is what pisses me off.
The problem is that "criminal" is a meaningless term when it comes to corporations. Or have you ever heard of a corporation being put in jail?
No, a corporation will pay a fine. "Criminal" carries a much higher threat value for real persons, who can be put away.
They're trying to make sure readers don't steal bandwidth
And I thought we had gone too far when we called illegal copying "stealing".
Dude, nobody has stolen their bandwidth. Look, it's still there! Look!
I'm surprised Slashdot's comments section doesn't die if you block it's advertisement code.
On the contrary, if your karma is high enough, you even get an option to disable advertisement. Some sites still understand that without readers, they're nothing but a guy wanking in the basement.
Basically, if you want to be paid for your content, put up a paywall. Ads are not payment. Putting them on your site is a bet, not a price ticket. You play a bit of lottery, every ad is a ticket that may or may not yield you some cash. If your business model is based on ads, then you're a professional gambler, nothing more. Sure, with large enough numbers, statistics usually level out in your favour, but never forget that there's no guarantee - getting 100 million page views with zero ad clicks may be a statistical anomaly, but it could happen. If that means you starve, then you've bet the farm on an unreliable business model.
Short version: Your problem, not mine.
While I generally agree that the calm, rational approach is the right one, it also shouldn't be the only one in your repertoire. And there are times when exploding on someone is the best way to handle a matter. That is especially true if the other side is acting first, and talking after the fact. Had they talked to him before removing the poster, I dare to guess he would have been calmer.
Here's why I can relate: I live in the center of my city. There's a street filled with pubs nearby. Near the weekend, lots of people over there are drunken assholes. Sometimes, on their way home or whatever, they come through my street, and yell, fight or piss in my entrance. If I ever catch one in the act, I've sworn to myself I'll rough him up badly. Because the fact that he got that idea in the first place disqualifies him for any rational discussion, calm or otherwise. And besides, the damage is already done.
While Miller reacted strongly, it seems to me that he was in a similar situation. They had already removed the poster, and their initial notification didn't indicate they were willing to reconsider, only that they'd answer questions. From his perspective, there was no option for a solution in his interest offered, so exploding was the act by which he intended to open up the issue, so the option "put the poster back" was at least on the table.
Could he have done it in a different way? Maybe. Sometimes, stating your thoughts calmly and rationally is the right thing. But sometimes, it also means you're not going to be taken seriously, and your opponent will not look for a compromise solution, but rather for a way to brush you off, exactly because you aren't loud, so you're not a thread, just a nuissance.
This being an investigation they are trying to find answers to questions like the ones that you asked. What's wrong about that?
Yes, and he just created a law that would (if it would work, which it won't) supply him with an endless stream of new stuff to wank to.
won't be charged if they took reasonable steps to report it
welcome to the "rat your girlfriend out to the police" state.
Here's the new Florida HOWTO take revenge on your ex-girlfriend:
a) whenever she sends you a nude pic, tell a non-existing e-mail address that looks similar to the local police about it.
b) when she breaks up with you, suddenly notice your "typo" and send it to the real address.
c) PROFIT - or rather, you've just reduced the number of boys she can break up with before it becomes a felony by one.
I withdraw my point about including it in the browser.
I sustain my points about there being a lot more important things and on the Mozilla team having lost sight of what really matters.
That's a good link, thanks a lot. Mod parent up (I can't because I already commented on this story, obviously).
And what do I do with my Bible when you make stuff up that doesn't exist either?
You ask me for the source, of course. I'll provide it, and you'll apologize. :-)
My greatest issue with the Neo-Athiest movement is that they insist on a radical fundamentalist reading of the Bible, which they then deplore.
You are misunderstanding the intent. We do not want people to read the bible in a radical interpretation, what we point out in doing so is that people are picking and choosing from what on the other hand they declare to be a holy book. How can you say on the one hand that this is a special book containing the greatest of wisdom that is true by the pure fact of being written there, and on the other hand discard whole sections of it?
If christians would treat the bible as, say, a collection of folk tales, we wouldn't rub your faces in it so much. But if you insist that, say, the 10 Commandments are the ultimate list of moral guidelines because they are the word of god, then you have to explain why putting witches to death isn't of the same category, because it is in the same holy bible (Exodus 22:18).
"If you can't spot my country from my words, then maybe it doesn't matter?"
And yet me being an American does matter?
By the same logic - if your words make a typical american trait obvious then yes, I will point it out. No, I'm not Canadian. I'm not dodging the matter, I'm pointing out that some nations have such a typical attitude that you can spot them and some don't. And I enjoy being guessed at, because it's funny. Especially with americans - when I was in Indiana many years ago, people thought I'd be from Australia. Both are a couple thousand kilometers away from Germany. :-)
but try a little pride.
We tried that half a century ago and it led us into war. Maybe you could learn something from us regarding that pride thing? It seems to be doing the same thing for you.
Hmm, I suggest a room full of Jesuits.
Gladly. Send them over whenever you find them. I enjoy a good discussion, and I prefer professional opponents over incompetent allies.
No - I have seen too many people that use them and MythBusters as proof. Scary bad stuff IMHO.
True, I have to agree on that. MythBusters as good entertainment and it's a "sciency" approach (especially that they do re-test things if viewers point out flaws, that alone is a huge one), but it's not solid science, which is largely boring. And "Bullshit" (which I've watched all episodes of) is provocative, entertaining and often revealing, but I wouldn't base an argument on it without doing some research myself.
You're a liar.
Here's the text of the Geneva Convention:
http://www.mineaction.org/downloads/Emine%20Policy%20Pages/Geneva%20Conventions/Geneva%20Convention%20III.pdf
The word "combatant" appears 0 times in it. The closest Article 3 comes to something similiar is "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities".
However, I must correct myself. The actual term used by the Bush administration was "unlawful combatant". Which makes no difference here, but does when you look into the Hague conventions, because the term "combatant" actually does appear there, but the term "unlawful combatant" does not.
Applying game theory is always an interesting approach.
However, this one misses what I consider an extremely important part: The multiplayer aspect. If obscurity is a part of your defense strategy, you can not cooperate with other defenders. As your are competing with the attacker, that means obscurity is only advantageous if the additional cost to the attacker is higher than the benefit you could gain from such cooperation. In general, your security mechanism will not be so new, innovative and hard to crack that this is true. It does depend on the size and resources of your organisation, though. If you're a large organisation that can keep a secret (say, a secret service), it could have a net advantage. For almost everyone else, though, having more eyes on the problem will generally provide a better solution than the additional difficulty that obscurity provides for the attacker.
Between the version number / release cycle insanity and this, I think it's finally time to switch. What a shame, I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. But the update today broke another extension, and building 3D into the browser is a sign of insanity that I thought we had wiped out with the demise of VMRL.
Dear Mozilla developers: If it's not something the majority of your users are going to actually use, it belongs into an extension or a plugin. Also, there are already several 3D engines with Firefox plugins, with years of experience in the field, because you don't build a good engine in a lazy summer. So with all due respect, what the fuck are you thinking?
I'm afraid you've fallen into the way-too-common bloatware trap: Not realizing when your product is feature complete and what it needs is polishing, not more stuff bolted on. There's enough CSS3 and HTML5 support still missing, for example.
Time to take a serious look at Chrome. :-(
I know Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source, but, according to its list there was no formal declaration of war. There were military operations sanctioned by congress.
More importantly, however, the guy killed here was not a member of any armed forces. By every international law or rules of conflict I'm aware of, he was a civilian or at most a guerilla fighter.
Please don't use the term "enemy combatant" when talking to me. That term is pure Newspeak and its purpose is to circumvent the Geneva Convention.
The terrorists have won. The US has become like them - killing its perceived enemies without evidence, trail or verdict has now become the official modus operandi. Tell me, what difference remains between you and them?
There's just two problems here:
a) Congress has not actually declared war. The 5th explicitly says "War", not "military operations". Bush went to great lengths to fight a war without it being a war.
b) You can't declare war on a "group". War by definition is an armed conflict between states or nations.
Now I do agree with you in principle that in war we don't consider courts and legal details for the enemy leadership, we view them as military targets. The problem isn't that you're not right - in principle. The problem is that the US government has been playing dirty with those principles. You can't ignore them when you like and then base your arguments on them when it's convenient. Either you play by the rules, or you don't get to appeal to the rules.
I don't even worry about small or young-looking adults - the main problem with this kind of access restriction is that it may work nice for clear cases (your 9 year old son trying to access 18+ content). But it is guaranteed to fail when the required and real age are close together. Extreme case: You don't really look that much different one day before and one day after your birthday.
Another poster has come up with a really clever, simple, straightforward and - in regard to these kinds of problems - reliable solution here:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2455598&cid=37577718
You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.
You're also paying for it being a little higher in quality than your average cheapest-component-everywhere bargain PC. If you compare the average Mac to a comparable quality brand PC, the difference is much less than your above.
I don't mind paying a premium for something that's worth it, but I hate it how the PC fanboys distort the numbers. Yes, Apple is more expensive. No, the difference isn't 30-40%, that's just ridiculous. You can't compare a product against its cheapest competitor and then claim it's that much more expensive than all its competitors. At least get your math right and use an average. And you can't compare an off-the-shelf product with building one yourself, unless you price in your time as well - what you're doing is comparing a product to the sum price of its components. I'm sure the car you're driving is also a lot more expensive than it would be if you'd bought all the parts and assembled it yourself.
Why didn't the judge honor the 'cancel message' procedure that technically exists in the NNTP protocol?"
Because that's implementation details that the judge doesn't and shouldn't care about. If they want to remove the content that way, he'll decide whether or not that's good enough to count as compliance. But the job of the judge is to decide what should be done, not how.
And so does the understanding of the Bible.
But the book itself doesn't, and that leaves people the option to apply it today, in whatever form they wish, which is the root cause for religious fundamentalists. If you declare that the nigger next door is your slave today, we can point at the laws saying that it ain't so. If you kill a gay guy and point to the bible telling you that's what you ought to be doing, we can't tell you that Appendix C or Amendment 12 overrules that, because they don't exist. The best we can do is remind you that you should've stoned him to death instead of shooting him.
Nice dig at the US though, I did notice you never put up your own country for me to point out its foibles, I am sure that was an oversight on your part though.
Neither did you. Funny how americans are immediately obvious as such when they talk. If you can't spot my country from my words, then maybe it doesn't matter?
"but we wouldn't put "love your parents" on the same list as "don't kill people just because" today."
Why not?
Because in todays western society, parents aren't vital for survival anymore. You can do without. It's not as comfortable, but it's possible.
Then you might want to start actually talking to clergy rather than lay people.
Been there, done that, remain unimpressed. Except for one thing: These guys do get excellent training in fields most of society doesn't consider important anymore, such as rhetorics. Real ones, not the crap they teach in business school to improve your presentations.
And you are going to use Penn and Teller for proof?
For what? I was quoting something they said I liked. You're really fishing for counter-arguments here. :-)
The Bible has withstood nearly 4000 years of peer review,
Errr what? Now you're appropriating terms. There is nothing whatsoever that is "peer review" about what happened to the bible. You need to read up on what "peer review" really means.
your biggest enemy isn't the physical medium, it's not being able to read it. You have to go to great lengths to read a floppy disc from 20 years ago today, and quite possibly even greater to make sense of the data you find (jpeg is from 1992, your old images on that floppy are definitely using some other format. If you're lucky, it's something like PCX that's at least documented.
Honestly, the low-tech solution is to stop worrying and make a regular appointment in your calendar every five years or so to move everything to a new storage. You're talking about storing something for 10, 20 years, you can afford to spend half an hour waiting for a disc copy every few years, can't you?
And when you do that, you can check that OS X 10.15, codename LolCat, can still read the formats you used. And if not, converting it then will be a lot easier than it would be another five years down the road.
I dare say that 4000 years ago, we had more freedom, except for when people were actually enslaved. Now, we are enslaved by the governments we've created to be our masters. Nothing has really changed other than we've obfuscated the truth, there still is slavery, as we all are forced to work for our master.
Actually, the meaning of "freedom" has also changed over times, more than once. And discussing the concept of "freedom" can't work well if you don't make sure everyone means the same thing.
For much of human history, people had less laws and less police, but the punishments were much harsher, and your opportunities much reduced. Often, surviving the next winter was your primary concern. Very often, leaving the village you were born in was a major event. During the middle ages, the majority of peasants never went more than about 10 miles from the place they were born during their entire lives.
So depending on your exact definition of "freedom", our ancestors could have had more (less rules to follow, less surveillance) or less (fewer opportunities, less clemency on minor transgressions, fewer ways to stop injustice) - and possibly both at the same time.
We have? Besides slavery being in our Constitution?
Not in mine. Oh, you're american. Sorry. Let me spell out the obvious: The US Constitution applies to the USA, not to the rest of the world. But one way or the other, slavery is abolished in the western world. See, the legal system is also one that changes over time.
Women are paid as well as men and never discriminated against? Parents aren't important, besides student test scores correlating with parent involvement? Well, I will let the rest of the world know.
Stop thinking in binary. Sure, we don't have 100% equality yet, but what remains is complaining about details if you compare it to the biblical attitude of the woman as a mans property. And sure, parents still are important, always will - but we wouldn't put "love your parents" on the same list as "don't kill people just because" today.
Which is like rolling your own distro using linuxfromscratch.com and then claiming that Debian is pointless to learn about because 'anyone can do it'
You've missed the main point again. Debian also changes over time. If Debian had been set in stone in 2001 and never changed since then, I'd definitely prefer rolling my own instead of using it today.
People spend (and have spent) lifetimes studying it and its triumphs and failures.
People have also spent lifetimes arguing the fine details of the ether, astrology, the norse gods, whether or not the earth is flat, how big exactly the little lights that are pinned on the semiglobe that spans the sky are, and many other things that later turned out to be entirely irrelevant.
You gloss over the book and then complain about those that gloss over it as well.
Actually, I've had the astonishing find that I've read a lot more of the bible than most of those who claim to be believers in it.
As Pen & Teller put it very well: Read the bible, we need more atheists. Really read it, including the long list of people you are supposed to kill for being witches, homosexuals, unfaithful women or some other unimaginably horrible crime. Then tell me again how a book that tells you to wipe out an entire nation and rape all its women is a great source of moral teachings.
And that is such a deep insight that you need to praise the rest of the book over it? Come on, a five-year-old can come up with that piece of wisdom. "Men are flawed" - no, really? Who would've thought...