"Mostly your opponents for the Gundam or card games will be strangers."
The major difference being that, in contrast with on-line gaming, one is obliged to directly interact with these strangers on a variety of levels. Slashdot is an excellent example of just some of the ways that not being physically present has notable effects: a lack of visual and auditory cues frequently results in what's said appearing to be more hostile than posters intended; trolls and flamers behave in ways that would be extremely unwise (to put it mildly) in a true social setting; and insults that would be completely unacceptable if discussing things face-to-face are common.
"Don't online gamers prefer to play co-op mode with teammates they know (at least from online play, if not real life) rather than strangers?"
The fact that you're entirely dependant on what somebody chooses to say about themselves means that it's impossible to "know" them on-line if you don't already know them off-line. It would for example be very unlikely for an overweight, balding 50 year-old male to pass themselves off as a beautiful 17 year-old girl in a social setting, just as it would be next to impossible for a 15 year old boy to convince people he had fought in Operation Desert Storm, yet these things happen all the time on the Internet, and this is I think a fundamental part of its attraction for many people. My point here is not that on-line gaming is in some way inferior to social gaming, but rather that it is different, and this is what makes it attractive to many people who have little or no interest in social gaming (and of course others who play both social and on-line games).
"Part of the reason the 360 will have trouble cracking the Japanese market is that the big selling point of the console is Live--in other words, social gaming."
On-line gaming is not social gaming. Social gaming is playing chess against a person who is sitting opposite you in the same room, or playing Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit with one's family or friends, not replacing computer controlled "bots" with "bots" operated by people who you've never seen or spoken to.
"In Japan that niche is filled by the arcade. $400 for an Xbox plus a monthly Live subscription on your home TV (probably not very large due to floor space constraints) can't compare to 4-on-4 Gundam with panoramic display, or action CCGs like World Club Champion Football or Sangokushi Taisen where you control the game by moving your soccer player or Three Kingdoms general card around the pitch/battlefield."
I.e. social gaming, where people directly interact with others that they already know and like instead of using anonymous and invisible strangers as replacements for AI routines. The fact that the Internet allows us to communicate with others in certain very restricted ways does not make being alone with a computer into a social activity any more than talking to a sales girl on the phone while eating a hamburger counts as having dinner together.
Those who aren't sure whether something is a social activity can find out by counting the number of people who are physically both present and participating. A social activity will always have a result that is greater than 1.
"If Stallman's main opponents (those who support software patents, DRM, trusted computing) had their way, a future version of Linus Torvalds would need to ASK PERMISSION from a future version of Microsoft before writing a competing operating system.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, that sort of scenario already exists with DVDs. If you want to build a product that plays DVDs, you have to ask permission from a group made up of current manufacturers."
The situation with DVDs is nothing like obtaining permission from Microsoft to write a competing operating system. DVD is a specific media format which has a variety of associated patents and trademarks that must be licensed to sell things that claim to play DVDs, but a company can manufacture and can sell competing devices that do the same job as DVD players in a different way without having to license _anything_ from the DVD Consortium. Such a device could use disks that look like and in most respects behave like DVDs, and use many of the same components as DVD players, but as long as it avoids their patents, trademarks, and logos, then it isn't a DVD player, so no licensing is necessary.
The equivalent in OS terms would therefore be licensing the right from Microsoft to write a competing operating system called "Windows" that used Microsoft's logos and trademarks, and ran Windows software because Microsoft had supplied detailed specifications to ensure that this was possible.
"It is those that push increased copyrights and try to limit fair use who have more in common with USSR and Communist China, than any other group."
If of course one ignores inconvenient facts such as all art and information except for state secrets being publicly owned (i.e. in the public domain) under both regimes.
"Have you ever seen a 70 year old copy of the Daily Mail (British tabloid newspaper)? At that point they were saying that the Jews would over-run the country and impose their alien values etc. Now its Muslims/Asians."
Just like they and other tabloids were saying "darkies" would in the 1950s and 1960s: "darkies" were taking jobs, "darkies" were turning vast swathes of Britain into ghettos where true humans feared to tread, and "darkies" were moving into nice streets in a deliberate attempt to make them undesirable, thereby depressing house prices so that other "darkies" could buy them cheaply. This together with their well known propensity for breeding like rabbits would, they said, result in Britain being completely overrun by "darkies" within the next couple of decades.
Nowadays of course, the children and grandchildren of those "darkies" speak with the same accents, wear the same clothes, do the same jobs, eat the same food, and have the same 2.4 children as their white neighbours, and both complain to each other about "those bloody Asians and Arabs" who are turning vast swathes of Britain into ghettos where true humans fear to tread, moving into nice streets in a deliberate attempt to make them undesirable, thereby depressing house prices so that other "bloody Asians and Arabs" can buy them cheaply, and breed like rabbits, so Britain will obviously be overrun with them in a couple of decades. And if that wasn't bad enough, everyone knows that they're all terrorists who'd kill their own grandmothers for the price of a "Daily Mail", yet the the government refuses to do anything to stop them from being blatantly foreign wherever and whenever they feel like it. Of course, they proclaim loudly, none of this would have happened if we hadn't joined the Common Market, which is run by foreigners who are jealous of Britain's greatness, and are undermining it by turning it into a dumping ground for people who are so foreign that other foreigners won't put up with them.
"Poor design is rather vague. I recall some complaining about the power connector on labtops was mounted directly on the motherboard meaning accidental pull in the power cord could break the motherboard, a much more expensive repair than simple change of connector. But, although everyone can agree that this is suboptimal - or poor - design, almost all models do this to save space and pieces. So the manufacturer was not liable. "Poor design" may be a feature."
"Poor design" refers to design decisions that result in an item being unfit for its purpose, failing to comply with any extant regulations in the country where it is being sold, or being unsafe or subject to failure during normal use. Any product that's offered for sale, irrespective of how cheap it is, must be of merchantable quality, be fit for the purpose for which it was sold, and comply with basic health and safety regulations together with any others that may apply to that class of item.
""known sub-standard components" - what does this term mean?"
It means deliberately using components which the manufacturer knows are likely to result in an item being unfit for its purpose, failing to comply with any extant regulations in the country where it is being sold, or being unsafe or subject to failure during normal use.
"And bad packaging I think is part of the assembly."
Indeed it is, hence the fact that the manufacturer is responsible for ensuring that it adequately protects the contents of the packaging from breakage, and in cases where potentially hazardous materials are being shipped, protects handlers and the environment from them.
"And normal handling conditions?"
Normal handling conditions are defined as conditions which comply with the handling instructions printed on the packaging, or in cases where these are absent, usual handling procedures for the type of product that is inside. Packaging for small electronic goods for example would not be expected to protect them from being fired from a cannon or stored at the bottom of a lake, but should support both carrying and stacking without the contents suffering any damage.
"they do disclaim liability for wear and tear due or excessive use"
They also disclaim liability for damage caused by improper use. Both of these are however contingent on there being demonstrable evidence of such wear and tear or improper use, so it does not for example allow them to use wear and tear or improper use as an excuse for having made outdoor shoes with soles that fall off when it rains.
"I am not saying that you cannot claim the warranty in these cases, only that it is vaguely defined and they have more money for lawyers."
It is vaguely defined because it covers an extremely wide range of products, many of which have nothing in common beyond the fact that they are manufactured and sold. I agree that courts (or the threat thereof) would usually be the only recourse when a manufacturer refuses to accept liability for a defective product (and such liability does not necessarily end when the warranty period expires), unless of course the item in question contravenes specific regulations that prohibit the manufacture, import, or sale of non-compliant products.
"But of course they are only liable for damage caused by errors in the manufacturing or assembly of the product."
They are also liable for for damage caused by poor design, using known sub-standard components, and bad packaging that leads to damage under normal handling conditions.
"The subthread started when I stated that VB skills weren't transferrable to Borland Pascal because the languages and their programming culture were very different."
I didn't see the original post you were replying to. It could possibly be due to the way my filters are set up.
"There was no suggestion that Borland was first or only with delegates and OOP in Pascal; I don't know about delegates, but I've used two other Pascal dialects that had objects."
I suggest you read your own post in isolation from the viewpoint of somebody who didn't see what you were replying to. It looks very much like you were claiming that Borland Pascal was the only Pascal with delegates and OOP built into it.
"I don't know about delegates, but I've used two other Pascal dialects that had objects"
Delegation isn't restricted to OOP, but is a general programming concept that passes the responsibility for implementing certain pieces of functionality to code that is supplied from outside at a later stage (i.e. without modifying the original code). An excellent example of procedural delegation is the "callbacks" commonly used in C libraries and APIs to implement application-specific functionality in generic routines by passing them a pointer to a function, e.g. the standard library's "qsort". This practice can justifiably be described as polymorphism, and C is far from being the only non-OO language to support it (the far more ancient LISP was doing this sort of thing nearly half a century ago).
The big deal that the Delphi community made about delegation was not therefore due to the fact that it wasn't present in a whole bunch of other languages that ran the gamut of paradigms, models, and philosophies, but because VB didn't have it (at least without using COM / Active X) prior to VB.NET, so it was a bullet point in Delphi's favour on their "why VB sucks" list.
"Sorry, you are an idiot after all."
It's something I've learned to live with, so there's no need to be sorry.
"Jeez, learn to read. That's your second "response" to something I didn't say."
You claimed that Borland Pascal was the only member of a list which _included Pascal and Ada_ that had delegates and OOP "built in". Apple Mac Pascal was clearly Pascal, and had delegates and OOP; the ISO Ada 1995 standard included OOP, which was sufficiently long ago for Ada to be commonly described as an object-oriented language. It supports delegation.
"Why hasn't any marketing genius snapped up on that and said that MS products are so unreliable and unsuited for business purposes that they have to use that as a disclaimer? It sort of screams "We're the exact opposite of mission critical! Use us if you have zero expectations!"
Marketing genius from which company? All Apple's software contains exactly the same disclaimers, as does stuff from Corel, Adobe, and any other company that's selling licenses for anything that you or I are likely to see.
""That's not what I said, dimwit. Read the sentence you quoted from my post again."
it's still cretinous blather, because MacApp used delegation to dispatch events to Pascal objects, which could in turn pass them to other Pascal objects (these were known as "target chains"). It goes without saying that this wouldn't have been possible if the language didn't support it.
"Borland's Pascal is the only one of these with delegates and built in OOP support."
It is far from being the only, or indeed the first one with built in OOP support. Apple were the pioneers here with Clascal for the Lisa, which they developed into Object Pascal in consultation with Niklaus Wirth. The language was used to write MacApp, Apple's OO application framework for the Macintosh, which shipped with Object Pascal in 1986 as part of the Macinstosh Programmer's Workbench; Borland's Mac Turbo Pascal included a similar but less elegant set of OO extensions that were subsequently added to their DOS compiler in 1989. This old (1985) article in MacTech discusses Object Pascal:
"It takes months or even years of ceasless propaganda of whatever bunch of psychopaths happens to be on charge to brainwash people to stop feeling compassion for the victim-du-jour."
Only because they've spent far longer being brainwashed into behaving in an entirely different way.
"It takes months of training to make sure that soldiers will shoot at other people without hesitation."
That's only true if you start with adults who've spent all their lives being trained to behave in a different way. That's why Islamic fundamentalists, Hitler's youth organisations, the Spartans, and gang bangers invariably indoctrinate children into the idea that killing whoever the leader tells you to is not only OK, but desirable.
"It took an endless stream of pseudoscience about "racial superiority" to justify slavery and colonization in the past, just to assuage the slavemasters guilty conscience"
That's a very recent development in certain Christian societies. Slavery in various forms (direct, land-tied serfdom, peonage, etc., etc., etc) has been the economic backbone of all pre-industrial civilisations, and none of them seem to have required any artificial racial, religious, or nationality-based rationale for it -- slavery throughout the vast majority of its history was equal-opportunity and open to anyone. The British Royal Navy for example used to press-gang Englishmen into what was slavery in all but name, Romans would happily sell other Romans who were unable to pay debts, the Spartans used force to enslave an entire Greek nation, Vikings enslaved other Vikings, etc., etc., etc., etc.
"Being evil isn't natural"
Of course not, but definitions of good and evil are relative rather than absolute. A Roman aristocrat who owned thousands of slaves would have been considered a good and moral person as long as he lived according to Roman morality, just as a mediaeval Muslim who only enslaved and sold non-Muslims would have been regarded as a good man in his society if he lived according to its rules. An ancient Greek father who killed his own son for disobedience would have been entirely correct according to the morality of that time and place -- the one in the wrong both morally and legally would be the son for not obeying his father. The huge variance in moral codes throughout both time and space serves to highlight the fact that morality is not intrinsic to us, just as not doing stupidly dangerous things isn't intrinsic to us. We learn the rules of the societies in which we live just as we learn that putting our hands in fires hurts.
"it takes hard work and determination to suppress people's natural inhibitions towards mistreating others"
If we have been taught that mistreating others is wrong from an early age. Children brought up in street gangs on the other hand are quite comfortable mistreating others, just as some meso-American cultures were happy sacrificing large numbers of humans by cutting their hearts out, and sword smiths in other civilisations tempered their blades by plunging the hot metal into the body of a living slave. _Everything_ that's been considered as immoral by one society has been actively encouraged by a different one somewhere or somewhen, including incest, cannibalism, ritual murder, slavery, torture, a wide variety of human and animal blood sports, (insert anything else you can think of).
"i would agree Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest I would disagree that it is not an inevitable consequence of intelligence. You empathize with others because they are like yourself, if you do not place value on the life or actions of another being that is similar to yourself then you are at the same time devaluing the characteristic you have in common."
You are missing two important points:
1) What we describe as "compassion" is actually due to being a type of group mammal with a herd instinct that regards other members of the same group as part of an extended family, and even that wouldn't take place if we hadn't evolved the concept of family from the fact that young mammals depend on at least one parent for food and protection.
2) Because of (1) above, we have a remarkable capacity to selectively discriminate against those who are part of a different group, just like chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, who have been observed killing identical chimpanzees from other groups. These differences can be purely arbitrary, e.g. the Indian caste system, or some European feudal systems, both of which graded people who look pretty much the same, speak identical languages, and are born in close proximity to one another based on what part of the hierarchy their parents occupied.
Intelligent machines are not mammals, or for that matter animals, but something else entirely whose "young", far from being helpless and dependant, will be manufactured fully formed, and with deliberately designed capacities that their "parents" lack. Expecting them to have similar emotions to a statistical sampling of one intelligent creature that is the result of an entirely different, much slower development process shaped by an environment that subjected it and its most remote ancestors to all manner of random, unrepeatable accidents without which it might either not exist, or have ended up being very different (what sort of emotions would an intelligent creature that evolved from velociraptors or cephalopods have, for example?) is unreasonable.
"It common practice to do that for musicians who just start with a band. This way, if someone copies their song and it becomes a hit without them paying for it (or puts it on a commercial cd without them knowing) they always have proof."
You can't successfully sue somebody for copyright infringement without evidence that they could reasonably have been expected to have heard / seen / read your work. "Poor Man's Copyrights" are therefore usually a defensive measure which can be used if an artist eventually becomes successful enough for somebody else to sue them for plagiarism. This sort of measure does not however work with patents because patent law contains a basic assumption that the patent holder is entitled to have it, so the burden of proof shifts: a copyright holder has to prove that you plagiarised their work; whereas you have to prove that a patent is invalid, and a postmarked envelope isn't enough to do that in the US with its first to invent system, let alone in Europe where patents are granted to whoever files them first.
The fact that some people lump patents, trademarks, and copyrights together as "intellectual Property" does not mean that they are the same in a legal sense, so measures that may be perfectly adequate to establish one are useless for the others. You could for example have a business that's demonstrably been operating under the name "Fred's Stuff" since 1750, but somebody else who trademarked "Fred's Stuff" in 2006 can still force you to stop using the name if you didn't bother to trademark it before them, and take reasonable measures to defend that trademark.
"An pray tell how would you defend from the detectors especially the ones that can tell which channel you are watching?"
By knowing that (a) the article you're linking to is talking about reconstructing images, not locating the equipment itself, which is a different problem, and (b) being aware of the fact that there are only around 26 of these vans, most if not all of which are fakes, hence the fact that evidence from a detector van has _never_ been used in a license evasion prosecution, or to obtain a warrant. You would have known this too if you'd actually bothered to read the sections about detector vans on some of the links I gave you, or simply knew enough about radio emission location to realise that, unless the TV is somewhere so remote that there aren't any others around (so knowing that there is simply a receiver somewhere nearby would be sufficient), it would require two detector vans in different places to triangulate a specific local oscillator that can't be picked up reliably more than 30m away, thus making triangulation extremely difficult under less than ideal circumstances (i.e. it would only rarely be effective).
So yes, _a_ van could tell what channel _a_ TV is watching by the rather simple expedient of subtracting 39.5 MHz from the local oscillator frequency, but it can't tell whether that TV is in your house, or one behind it, or for that matter the one next to it without another van somewhere else to monitor and triangulate the same TV set, if indeed either or both of them could distinguish the signal from all the the other electronic noise that's present in many domestic environments (microwave cookers, embedded and personal computers, wireless networks, etc., etc., etc.). And that local oscillator "what channel" trick wouldn't work at all if the TV / monitor was receiving television through cable or satellite set-top box linked to it by SCART, composite video, or HDMI, because the very high frequencies that these devices operate at require heavy shielding to prevent localised interference from nearby electronics, and said shielding works in both directions, so there is minimal signal bleed to look for in the first place, even if such high frequencies managed to make their way through attenuators such as walls and doors (improbable).
The Beeb, in what has to be one of the most effective long-term corporate FUD campaigns in history, has been claiming powers for their detector vans since the mid 1950s which were so astounding that none of the world's spy agency counter-espionage teams or militaries could get their hands on anything like it at that time, despite some of them having budgets that made the BBC's entire yearly income look like a rounding error on the daily bill for washing servicemen's socks. Yet the British public, in a typical display of naivety, completely believed that an organisation which spent less on an entire series of "Dr. Who" than American networks did on an episode of what for them were incredibly low budget productions such as "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp" could not only develop electronics that were far beyond the capabilities possessed by anyone else at the time, but also managed to run a large collection of hot-cathode devices off a single van battery with a level of stability and reliably that was superior to the BBC itself ("Technical Fault. Please do not adjust your set." was a famous and much lampooned message in those days).
"Even better in your own words:- (2) they get a court order, in which case they will be accompanied by a police officer who will say that they have such an order"
Getting such an order does however require evidence, and the fact that you haven't paid for a TV license isn't evidence that you require one, so it can't be used to get a search warrant. They're basically in a catch-22 situation: if they have no evidence beyond the fact that you haven't got a TV license, and you refuse to let them in to gather that evidence, then they haven't got enough evidence to get the search warrant which they require to get evidence of license evasion. The reason they send all those threatening computer generated letters with things like "Final Notice" written on them, and then have nasty bozos turn up telling lies is due to the fact that nearly every successful license evasion prosecution has been due to people being intimidated into incriminating themselves, or doing so through stupidity such as having TV sets that can easily be seen or heard with programmes on them from outside.
"The spot fine is a direct and immediate result of the presumption of guilt you will have been warned and notified in advance that entry in required"
Entry is _never_ required in the UK without warrant, and in such cases, there must be a police officer in attendance. Somebody sending you a letter claiming otherwise doesn't change this one whit or iota.
"you have refused an appointed officer the chance to inspect your equipment to prove licensed within the law"
TV licensing people are not appointed officers of anything. The BBC sub-contracts license collection and enforcement to Capita Services Ltd., "easy payment" schemes to Revenue Services Ltd., and licence-related PR and publicity to the AMV Consortium, private corporations which, together with the BBC, operate under the "TV Licensing" trademark. The guys who come round in the uniforms with bullet proof vests and a nasty attitude work for Capita Services Ltd., and have exactly the same right of entry into your home as security guards, who also wear uniforms with bullet proof vests and work for private corporations, i.e. none.
"Therefore you are guilty and are responsible for the fine. "
You are not guilty of anything without proof, which they can't get if you don't let them in (unless of course you are silly enough to use an unlicensed TV where it can be seen or heard from the street). They also need proof to obtain a search warrant, which magistrates don't grant just because some employee of Capita Services Ltd., asks for it, and "our database says this premises hasn't got a TV license" isn't proof of receiving TV broadcasts.
"You can later challenge this in court, but it is however most certainly A CRIMINAL OFFENSE."
Which means that the rules of evidence are precisely the same as those of all other criminal cases, i.e. there needs to be some for a prosecution to take place, and refusing to admit an employee of a private corporation and ignoring threatening letters from said private corporation isn't evidence of committing any sort of crime.
"As the person refusing access YOU are responsible for YOUR part in the law being broken and are therefore equally culpable under the law."
Refusing access to an employee of Capita Group Ltd. isn't a crime, so no laws have been broken to be culpable under. Here are some links with plenty of evidence from both correspondence with the BBC itself and large numbers of personal experiences that make it quite clear how far you've been taken in the FUD:
Opening a door does not count as an invitation to enter, and employees of the TVL have no more right of entry to your premises than newspaper delivery boys, so one can open the door, tell them to leave, and then close it again.
"they can spot fine you for not co-operating"
They have no more ability to spot-fine people than the milkman has for not cooperating with him. Even the police can't spot-fine for refusing to let them in, and cannot use force to enter private premises unless they have a search or arrest warrant. Despite the official-looking uniforms and an attitude that is calculated to intimidate people into thinking otherwise, TVL employees have precisely the same status as any private citizens: they are not police, and unlike fire fighters, gas board employees, and various others with a statutory right of entry under limited sets of circumstances pertaining to individual or public safety, can neither demand nor force entry without obtaining a court order.
"worse still if it's not your house YOU opened the door and it's YOU who has to pay or go to court"
They can't take you to court without proof that you were receiving broadcasts without a license. This proof can be obtained in two ways: (1) somebody lets them in to gather evidence; or (2) they get a court order, in which case they will be accompanied by a police officer who will say that they have such an order, offer you the chance to read it, and advise you of your legal rights together with the penalties for not complying with the order. It's a good idea to admit them at this point, not only because the penalties for not doing so are severe, but also due to the fact that the policeman is a neutral party who will ensure that the TVL employee doesn't get overzealous in his searches (strict rules govern what they can search for, where they search for it, and how the searches may performed. They cannot for example look under or in mattresses, tear up floors, turn out drawers and cupboards or rifle through stuff that's in them, move heavy furniture around, or damage any of your property).
TVL and its employees rely on FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to perpetuate a common public belief that their powers go far beyond those of mere police, armed forces, or any of the other government-run organisations who are responsible for trivia such as national security rather than the vitally important role of funding the BBC. I therefore humbly ask that you actually check up on things before posting stuff that helps perpetuate the prevailing idea that getting a job with the TVL makes people become some sort of deity who isn't bound by the same laws that everybody else in the UK lives under.
"Yep but the equipment has to be *incapable* of tv reception on examination."
The system as a whole has to be incapable of receiving broadcasts, not the individual components thereof. A receiver with a working antenna that can demonstrably receive broadcasts would count as such as system, but the antenna without a device capable of receiving, or a receiving device without an antenna do not require a license.
"Even a video recorder which has a tv reciever in it is subject to the law."
Only if there is a working antenna for the receiver to be connected to (it does not have to actually be connected, but must have the potential to be so connected).
"If however you have ripped the tv tuner(s) out of your equipment and are running scart / composite only then you are fine."
You don't have to rip the TV tuners out of an anything, because TV tuners in and of themselves cannot receive broadcasts without a suitable antenna, and therefore do not have to be licensed. This means that one can connect (for example) the RF output from a VCR or DVD player to the RF input of a TV without having to pay a license if such a system has no antenna capable of receiving TV broadcasts. Note that not having a lead between an antenna connection point and a receiver that are in the same room doesn't count as being incapable of receiving, and neither does having a portable or easily moved receiver that just happens to be in a room without an antenna connector when the inspector is checking things.
"So all you have to do is denounce your "wife" and ill-begotten family, at some point in your life?"
The Catholic definition of repenting means apologising for what you do, not denouncing others.
"That still sounds an awful lot like a version of telling people who they should and should not associate with."
It actually sounds an awful lot like the Catholic Church telling people what it defines as marriage, i.e. a permanent union between a male Catholic and a female Catholic who swear to be bound by certain rules during a public ceremony. For this to count as them telling people who they can associate with, every association would have to be defined as a permanent union where people swear to be bound by certain rules during an elaborate public ceremony.
"Fortunately over time (like two thousand years) religions seem to get established and people pick out the good bits to believe in and sweep the bad bits under the rug."
Anybody who has studied the history of the currently established religions knows that this process has been happening since they started. The thing that separates cults like scientology from the more established religions is the fact that the entire cult has a single official doctrine which everybody is expected to follow, whereas the major religions started life as a set of distinct groups, each of which had their own interpretations of what the religion was, who it was aimed at, which of a large number of texts were significant, and what ceremonies and practices should be observed by members. Over time, some groups grow, others disappear, new ones form, and old ones change, and while all of these share a core set of beliefs, the way they interpret them can vary so widely that outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that they were different religions (e.g. Islam's Whirling Dervishes and Wahabi).
"Give Scientology a couple of millennia and a bunch of people believing in flying saucers and ancient ghosts might seem harmlessly quaint. Or they might be a cornerstone of society in much of the world."
History indicates that religions which expect everyone to believe exactly the same things and follow exactly the same practices don't ever become mainstream, because there is no room for the personal interpretation that is necessary for the religion _as a whole_ to grow and evolve. And for personal interpretation to be possible, there must be ambiguity in both the nature of what is being worshipped, and any texts that describe it, otherwise it's impossible for new prophets to reinterpret things, and new groups to reinterpret those prophets' reinterpretations in different ways, thereby permitting those with many, many different shades and variations of a basic belief structure to find something somewhere that suits them. Scientology defines too much, and casts too much of what it defines in stone for this sort of ambiguity-based reinterpretation to take place, so it cannot develop into something that offers a variety of options to people with different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds.
The parent was humorously paraphrasing the standard Slashdot advice to software writers and musicians from people who want to pretend that they're doing content producers a favour by copying their work without permission, e.g.:
Software should be given away, and those who write it should make money from selling support. Music should be given away, and musicians should make money from touring and merchandising.
A sub-notebook with a real keyboard _and_ an iPhone-style multi touch display would be nice to have though, because they could eliminate the usual "mouse pad", thereby leaving more real-estate for a keyboard with a decent set of keys, and If they made the display optionally swivel and fold over backwards, it could also be used as tablet PC with a UI that'd be streets ahead of other tablets.
"That has to be the best reason to study one's religion I've ever heard of. It also makes for interesting conversations: "I studied the holy scriptures so I could have a closer relationship with Jahweh/God/Allah." - "Well, as for me... You see, I think bacon has this in-built [i]deliciousness factor[/i]...""
He reckoned that they were one and the same thing. His reasoning was based on the conviction that God deliberately created humans with the ability to learn more and more about how the world he put them in works, so he would have known that we would rapidly (on God time scales) reach a point where a lot of the rules that were intended to prevent us from doing silly things out of ignorance would no longer be required. It was, he said, a lot like the rules that parents enforce on young children so that they won't harm themselves: a mother might for example prohibit a child of three from entering a kitchen while food is being cooked to prevent them from being burned or scalded, while an older child would only be allowed in under strict supervision, but those who are still older can freely use the kitchen to cook meals for themselves if they wish. And just as a mother wouldn't expect a sixteen year old to require the same level of supervision as younger, less experienced offspring, God doesn't expect those of his children who have reached a level where they can figure out a lot of stuff for themselves to live by the same set of "Don't do that because it's bad" rules he gave to people who were (in a technological sense) still toddlers.
I thought this was an interesting way of looking at things that, for those who believe in an all-powerful creator, made a lot more sense than the traditional "God told a bunch of nomadic goat herders living in tents to do this, so we have to do it as well" viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mostly your opponents for the Gundam or card games will be strangers."
The major difference being that, in contrast with on-line gaming, one is obliged to directly interact with these strangers on a variety of levels. Slashdot is an excellent example of just some of the ways that not being physically present has notable effects: a lack of visual and auditory cues frequently results in what's said appearing to be more hostile than posters intended; trolls and flamers behave in ways that would be extremely unwise (to put it mildly) in a true social setting; and insults that would be completely unacceptable if discussing things face-to-face are common.
"Don't online gamers prefer to play co-op mode with teammates they know (at least from online play, if not real life) rather than strangers?"
The fact that you're entirely dependant on what somebody chooses to say about themselves means that it's impossible to "know" them on-line if you don't already know them off-line. It would for example be very unlikely for an overweight, balding 50 year-old male to pass themselves off as a beautiful 17 year-old girl in a social setting, just as it would be next to impossible for a 15 year old boy to convince people he had fought in Operation Desert Storm, yet these things happen all the time on the Internet, and this is I think a fundamental part of its attraction for many people. My point here is not that on-line gaming is in some way inferior to social gaming, but rather that it is different, and this is what makes it attractive to many people who have little or no interest in social gaming (and of course others who play both social and on-line games).
"Part of the reason the 360 will have trouble cracking the Japanese market is that the big selling point of the console is Live--in other words, social gaming."
On-line gaming is not social gaming. Social gaming is playing chess against a person who is sitting opposite you in the same room, or playing Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit with one's family or friends, not replacing computer controlled "bots" with "bots" operated by people who you've never seen or spoken to.
"In Japan that niche is filled by the arcade. $400 for an Xbox plus a monthly Live subscription on your home TV (probably not very large due to floor space constraints) can't compare to 4-on-4 Gundam with panoramic display, or action CCGs like World Club Champion Football or Sangokushi Taisen where you control the game by moving your soccer player or Three Kingdoms general card around the pitch/battlefield."
I.e. social gaming, where people directly interact with others that they already know and like instead of using anonymous and invisible strangers as replacements for AI routines. The fact that the Internet allows us to communicate with others in certain very restricted ways does not make being alone with a computer into a social activity any more than talking to a sales girl on the phone while eating a hamburger counts as having dinner together.
Those who aren't sure whether something is a social activity can find out by counting the number of people who are physically both present and participating. A social activity will always have a result that is greater than 1.
"If Stallman's main opponents (those who support software patents, DRM, trusted computing) had their way, a future version of Linus Torvalds would need to ASK PERMISSION from a future version of Microsoft before writing a competing operating system.
In case you think I'm exaggerating, that sort of scenario already exists with DVDs. If you want to build a product that plays DVDs, you have to ask permission from a group made up of current manufacturers."
The situation with DVDs is nothing like obtaining permission from Microsoft to write a competing operating system. DVD is a specific media format which has a variety of associated patents and trademarks that must be licensed to sell things that claim to play DVDs, but a company can manufacture and can sell competing devices that do the same job as DVD players in a different way without having to license _anything_ from the DVD Consortium. Such a device could use disks that look like and in most respects behave like DVDs, and use many of the same components as DVD players, but as long as it avoids their patents, trademarks, and logos, then it isn't a DVD player, so no licensing is necessary.
The equivalent in OS terms would therefore be licensing the right from Microsoft to write a competing operating system called "Windows" that used Microsoft's logos and trademarks, and ran Windows software because Microsoft had supplied detailed specifications to ensure that this was possible.
"It is those that push increased copyrights and try to limit fair use who have more in common with USSR and Communist China, than any other group."
If of course one ignores inconvenient facts such as all art and information except for state secrets being publicly owned (i.e. in the public domain) under both regimes.
"Have you ever seen a 70 year old copy of the Daily Mail (British tabloid newspaper)? At that point they were saying that the Jews would over-run the country and impose their alien values etc. Now its Muslims/Asians."
Just like they and other tabloids were saying "darkies" would in the 1950s and 1960s: "darkies" were taking jobs, "darkies" were turning vast swathes of Britain into ghettos where true humans feared to tread, and "darkies" were moving into nice streets in a deliberate attempt to make them undesirable, thereby depressing house prices so that other "darkies" could buy them cheaply. This together with their well known propensity for breeding like rabbits would, they said, result in Britain being completely overrun by "darkies" within the next couple of decades.
Nowadays of course, the children and grandchildren of those "darkies" speak with the same accents, wear the same clothes, do the same jobs, eat the same food, and have the same 2.4 children as their white neighbours, and both complain to each other about "those bloody Asians and Arabs" who are turning vast swathes of Britain into ghettos where true humans fear to tread, moving into nice streets in a deliberate attempt to make them undesirable, thereby depressing house prices so that other "bloody Asians and Arabs" can buy them cheaply, and breed like rabbits, so Britain will obviously be overrun with them in a couple of decades. And if that wasn't bad enough, everyone knows that they're all terrorists who'd kill their own grandmothers for the price of a "Daily Mail", yet the the government refuses to do anything to stop them from being blatantly foreign wherever and whenever they feel like it. Of course, they proclaim loudly, none of this would have happened if we hadn't joined the Common Market, which is run by foreigners who are jealous of Britain's greatness, and are undermining it by turning it into a dumping ground for people who are so foreign that other foreigners won't put up with them.
"Poor design is rather vague. I recall some complaining about the power connector on labtops was mounted directly on the motherboard meaning accidental pull in the power cord could break the motherboard, a much more expensive repair than simple change of connector. But, although everyone can agree that this is suboptimal - or poor - design, almost all models do this to save space and pieces. So the manufacturer was not liable. "Poor design" may be a feature."
"Poor design" refers to design decisions that result in an item being unfit for its purpose, failing to comply with any extant regulations in the country where it is being sold, or being unsafe or subject to failure during normal use. Any product that's offered for sale, irrespective of how cheap it is, must be of merchantable quality, be fit for the purpose for which it was sold, and comply with basic health and safety regulations together with any others that may apply to that class of item.
""known sub-standard components" - what does this term mean?"
It means deliberately using components which the manufacturer knows are likely to result in an item being unfit for its purpose, failing to comply with any extant regulations in the country where it is being sold, or being unsafe or subject to failure during normal use.
"And bad packaging I think is part of the assembly."
Indeed it is, hence the fact that the manufacturer is responsible for ensuring that it adequately protects the contents of the packaging from breakage, and in cases where potentially hazardous materials are being shipped, protects handlers and the environment from them.
"And normal handling conditions?"
Normal handling conditions are defined as conditions which comply with the handling instructions printed on the packaging, or in cases where these are absent, usual handling procedures for the type of product that is inside. Packaging for small electronic goods for example would not be expected to protect them from being fired from a cannon or stored at the bottom of a lake, but should support both carrying and stacking without the contents suffering any damage.
"they do disclaim liability for wear and tear due or excessive use"
They also disclaim liability for damage caused by improper use. Both of these are however contingent on there being demonstrable evidence of such wear and tear or improper use, so it does not for example allow them to use wear and tear or improper use as an excuse for having made outdoor shoes with soles that fall off when it rains.
"I am not saying that you cannot claim the warranty in these cases, only that it is vaguely defined and they have more money for lawyers."
It is vaguely defined because it covers an extremely wide range of products, many of which have nothing in common beyond the fact that they are manufactured and sold. I agree that courts (or the threat thereof) would usually be the only recourse when a manufacturer refuses to accept liability for a defective product (and such liability does not necessarily end when the warranty period expires), unless of course the item in question contravenes specific regulations that prohibit the manufacture, import, or sale of non-compliant products.
"But of course they are only liable for damage caused by errors in the manufacturing or assembly of the product."
They are also liable for for damage caused by poor design, using known sub-standard components, and bad packaging that leads to damage under normal handling conditions.
"The subthread started when I stated that VB skills weren't transferrable to Borland Pascal because the languages and their programming culture were very different."
I didn't see the original post you were replying to. It could possibly be due to the way my filters are set up.
"There was no suggestion that Borland was first or only with delegates and OOP in Pascal; I don't know about delegates, but I've used two other Pascal dialects that had objects."
I suggest you read your own post in isolation from the viewpoint of somebody who didn't see what you were replying to. It looks very much like you were claiming that Borland Pascal was the only Pascal with delegates and OOP built into it.
"I don't know about delegates, but I've used two other Pascal dialects that had objects"
Delegation isn't restricted to OOP, but is a general programming concept that passes the responsibility for implementing certain pieces of functionality to code that is supplied from outside at a later stage (i.e. without modifying the original code). An excellent example of procedural delegation is the "callbacks" commonly used in C libraries and APIs to implement application-specific functionality in generic routines by passing them a pointer to a function, e.g. the standard library's "qsort". This practice can justifiably be described as polymorphism, and C is far from being the only non-OO language to support it (the far more ancient LISP was doing this sort of thing nearly half a century ago).
The big deal that the Delphi community made about delegation was not therefore due to the fact that it wasn't present in a whole bunch of other languages that ran the gamut of paradigms, models, and philosophies, but because VB didn't have it (at least without using COM / Active X) prior to VB.NET, so it was a bullet point in Delphi's favour on their "why VB sucks" list.
"Sorry, you are an idiot after all."
It's something I've learned to live with, so there's no need to be sorry.
"Jeez, learn to read. That's your second "response" to something I didn't say."
You claimed that Borland Pascal was the only member of a list which _included Pascal and Ada_ that had delegates and OOP "built in". Apple Mac Pascal was clearly Pascal, and had delegates and OOP; the ISO Ada 1995 standard included OOP, which was sufficiently long ago for Ada to be commonly described as an object-oriented language. It supports delegation.
"Why hasn't any marketing genius snapped up on that and said that MS products are so unreliable and unsuited for business purposes that they have to use that as a disclaimer? It sort of screams "We're the exact opposite of mission critical! Use us if you have zero expectations!"
Marketing genius from which company? All Apple's software contains exactly the same disclaimers, as does stuff from Corel, Adobe, and any other company that's selling licenses for anything that you or I are likely to see.
""That's not what I said, dimwit. Read the sentence you quoted from my post again."
it's still cretinous blather, because MacApp used delegation to dispatch events to Pascal objects, which could in turn pass them to other Pascal objects (these were known as "target chains"). It goes without saying that this wouldn't have been possible if the language didn't support it.
I believe it also has partial support for Metrowerks Pascal.
"Borland's Pascal is the only one of these with delegates and built in OOP support."
It is far from being the only, or indeed the first one with built in OOP support. Apple were the pioneers here with Clascal for the Lisa, which they developed into Object Pascal in consultation with Niklaus Wirth. The language was used to write MacApp, Apple's OO application framework for the Macintosh, which shipped with Object Pascal in 1986 as part of the Macinstosh Programmer's Workbench; Borland's Mac Turbo Pascal included a similar but less elegant set of OO extensions that were subsequently added to their DOS compiler in 1989. This old (1985) article in MacTech discusses Object Pascal:
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/
"It takes months or even years of ceasless propaganda of whatever bunch of psychopaths happens to be on charge to brainwash people to stop feeling compassion for the victim-du-jour."
Only because they've spent far longer being brainwashed into behaving in an entirely different way.
"It takes months of training to make sure that soldiers will shoot at other people without hesitation."
That's only true if you start with adults who've spent all their lives being trained to behave in a different way. That's why Islamic fundamentalists, Hitler's youth organisations, the Spartans, and gang bangers invariably indoctrinate children into the idea that killing whoever the leader tells you to is not only OK, but desirable.
"It took an endless stream of pseudoscience about "racial superiority" to justify slavery and colonization in the past, just to assuage the slavemasters guilty conscience"
That's a very recent development in certain Christian societies. Slavery in various forms (direct, land-tied serfdom, peonage, etc., etc., etc) has been the economic backbone of all pre-industrial civilisations, and none of them seem to have required any artificial racial, religious, or nationality-based rationale for it -- slavery throughout the vast majority of its history was equal-opportunity and open to anyone. The British Royal Navy for example used to press-gang Englishmen into what was slavery in all but name, Romans would happily sell other Romans who were unable to pay debts, the Spartans used force to enslave an entire Greek nation, Vikings enslaved other Vikings, etc., etc., etc., etc.
"Being evil isn't natural"
Of course not, but definitions of good and evil are relative rather than absolute. A Roman aristocrat who owned thousands of slaves would have been considered a good and moral person as long as he lived according to Roman morality, just as a mediaeval Muslim who only enslaved and sold non-Muslims would have been regarded as a good man in his society if he lived according to its rules. An ancient Greek father who killed his own son for disobedience would have been entirely correct according to the morality of that time and place -- the one in the wrong both morally and legally would be the son for not obeying his father. The huge variance in moral codes throughout both time and space serves to highlight the fact that morality is not intrinsic to us, just as not doing stupidly dangerous things isn't intrinsic to us. We learn the rules of the societies in which we live just as we learn that putting our hands in fires hurts.
"it takes hard work and determination to suppress people's natural inhibitions towards mistreating others"
If we have been taught that mistreating others is wrong from an early age. Children brought up in street gangs on the other hand are quite comfortable mistreating others, just as some meso-American cultures were happy sacrificing large numbers of humans by cutting their hearts out, and sword smiths in other civilisations tempered their blades by plunging the hot metal into the body of a living slave. _Everything_ that's been considered as immoral by one society has been actively encouraged by a different one somewhere or somewhen, including incest, cannibalism, ritual murder, slavery, torture, a wide variety of human and animal blood sports, (insert anything else you can think of).
"i would agree Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest I would disagree that it is not an inevitable consequence of intelligence. You empathize with others because they are like yourself, if you do not place value on the life or actions of another being that is similar to yourself then you are at the same time devaluing the characteristic you have in common."
You are missing two important points:
1) What we describe as "compassion" is actually due to being a type of group mammal with a herd instinct that regards other members of the same group as part of an extended family, and even that wouldn't take place if we hadn't evolved the concept of family from the fact that young mammals depend on at least one parent for food and protection.
2) Because of (1) above, we have a remarkable capacity to selectively discriminate against those who are part of a different group, just like chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, who have been observed killing identical chimpanzees from other groups. These differences can be purely arbitrary, e.g. the Indian caste system, or some European feudal systems, both of which graded people who look pretty much the same, speak identical languages, and are born in close proximity to one another based on what part of the hierarchy their parents occupied.
Intelligent machines are not mammals, or for that matter animals, but something else entirely whose "young", far from being helpless and dependant, will be manufactured fully formed, and with deliberately designed capacities that their "parents" lack. Expecting them to have similar emotions to a statistical sampling of one intelligent creature that is the result of an entirely different, much slower development process shaped by an environment that subjected it and its most remote ancestors to all manner of random, unrepeatable accidents without which it might either not exist, or have ended up being very different (what sort of emotions would an intelligent creature that evolved from velociraptors or cephalopods have, for example?) is unreasonable.
"It common practice to do that for musicians who just start with a band. This way, if someone copies their song and it becomes a hit without them paying for it (or puts it on a commercial cd without them knowing) they always have proof."
You can't successfully sue somebody for copyright infringement without evidence that they could reasonably have been expected to have heard / seen / read your work. "Poor Man's Copyrights" are therefore usually a defensive measure which can be used if an artist eventually becomes successful enough for somebody else to sue them for plagiarism. This sort of measure does not however work with patents because patent law contains a basic assumption that the patent holder is entitled to have it, so the burden of proof shifts: a copyright holder has to prove that you plagiarised their work; whereas you have to prove that a patent is invalid, and a postmarked envelope isn't enough to do that in the US with its first to invent system, let alone in Europe where patents are granted to whoever files them first.
The fact that some people lump patents, trademarks, and copyrights together as "intellectual Property" does not mean that they are the same in a legal sense, so measures that may be perfectly adequate to establish one are useless for the others. You could for example have a business that's demonstrably been operating under the name "Fred's Stuff" since 1750, but somebody else who trademarked "Fred's Stuff" in 2006 can still force you to stop using the name if you didn't bother to trademark it before them, and take reasonable measures to defend that trademark.
"An pray tell how would you defend from the detectors especially the ones that can tell which channel you are watching?"
By knowing that (a) the article you're linking to is talking about reconstructing images, not locating the equipment itself, which is a different problem, and (b) being aware of the fact that there are only around 26 of these vans, most if not all of which are fakes, hence the fact that evidence from a detector van has _never_ been used in a license evasion prosecution, or to obtain a warrant. You would have known this too if you'd actually bothered to read the sections about detector vans on some of the links I gave you, or simply knew enough about radio emission location to realise that, unless the TV is somewhere so remote that there aren't any others around (so knowing that there is simply a receiver somewhere nearby would be sufficient), it would require two detector vans in different places to triangulate a specific local oscillator that can't be picked up reliably more than 30m away, thus making triangulation extremely difficult under less than ideal circumstances (i.e. it would only rarely be effective).
So yes, _a_ van could tell what channel _a_ TV is watching by the rather simple expedient of subtracting 39.5 MHz from the local oscillator frequency, but it can't tell whether that TV is in your house, or one behind it, or for that matter the one next to it without another van somewhere else to monitor and triangulate the same TV set, if indeed either or both of them could distinguish the signal from all the the other electronic noise that's present in many domestic environments (microwave cookers, embedded and personal computers, wireless networks, etc., etc., etc.). And that local oscillator "what channel" trick wouldn't work at all if the TV / monitor was receiving television through cable or satellite set-top box linked to it by SCART, composite video, or HDMI, because the very high frequencies that these devices operate at require heavy shielding to prevent localised interference from nearby electronics, and said shielding works in both directions, so there is minimal signal bleed to look for in the first place, even if such high frequencies managed to make their way through attenuators such as walls and doors (improbable).
The Beeb, in what has to be one of the most effective long-term corporate FUD campaigns in history, has been claiming powers for their detector vans since the mid 1950s which were so astounding that none of the world's spy agency counter-espionage teams or militaries could get their hands on anything like it at that time, despite some of them having budgets that made the BBC's entire yearly income look like a rounding error on the daily bill for washing servicemen's socks. Yet the British public, in a typical display of naivety, completely believed that an organisation which spent less on an entire series of "Dr. Who" than American networks did on an episode of what for them were incredibly low budget productions such as "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp" could not only develop electronics that were far beyond the capabilities possessed by anyone else at the time, but also managed to run a large collection of hot-cathode devices off a single van battery with a level of stability and reliably that was superior to the BBC itself ("Technical Fault. Please do not adjust your set." was a famous and much lampooned message in those days).
"Even better in your own words :- (2) they get a court order, in which case they will be accompanied by a police officer who will say that they have such an order"
Getting such an order does however require evidence, and the fact that you haven't paid for a TV license isn't evidence that you require one, so it can't be used to get a search warrant. They're basically in a catch-22 situation: if they have no evidence beyond the fact that you haven't got a TV license, and you refuse to let them in to gather that evidence, then they haven't got enough evidence to get the search warrant which they require to get evidence of license evasion. The reason they send all those threatening computer generated letters with things like "Final Notice" written on them, and then have nasty bozos turn up telling lies is due to the fact that nearly every successful license evasion prosecution has been due to people being intimidated into incriminating themselves, or doing so through stupidity such as having TV sets that can easily be seen or heard with programmes on them from outside.
"The spot fine is a direct and immediate result of the presumption of guilt you will have been warned and notified in advance that entry in required"
w ers.htm (make sure you read through the other section, because there's some good info in there)
Entry is _never_ required in the UK without warrant, and in such cases, there must be a police officer in attendance. Somebody sending you a letter claiming otherwise doesn't change this one whit or iota.
"you have refused an appointed officer the chance to inspect your equipment to prove licensed within the law"
TV licensing people are not appointed officers of anything. The BBC sub-contracts license collection and enforcement to Capita Services Ltd., "easy payment" schemes to Revenue Services Ltd., and licence-related PR and publicity to the AMV Consortium, private corporations which, together with the BBC, operate under the "TV Licensing" trademark. The guys who come round in the uniforms with bullet proof vests and a nasty attitude work for Capita Services Ltd., and have exactly the same right of entry into your home as security guards, who also wear uniforms with bullet proof vests and work for private corporations, i.e. none.
"Therefore you are guilty and are responsible for the fine. "
You are not guilty of anything without proof, which they can't get if you don't let them in (unless of course you are silly enough to use an unlicensed TV where it can be seen or heard from the street). They also need proof to obtain a search warrant, which magistrates don't grant just because some employee of Capita Services Ltd., asks for it, and "our database says this premises hasn't got a TV license" isn't proof of receiving TV broadcasts.
"You can later challenge this in court, but it is however most certainly A CRIMINAL OFFENSE."
Which means that the rules of evidence are precisely the same as those of all other criminal cases, i.e. there needs to be some for a prosecution to take place, and refusing to admit an employee of a private corporation and ignoring threatening letters from said private corporation isn't evidence of committing any sort of crime.
"As the person refusing access YOU are responsible for YOUR part in the law being broken and are therefore equally culpable under the law."
Refusing access to an employee of Capita Group Ltd. isn't a crime, so no laws have been broken to be culpable under. Here are some links with plenty of evidence from both correspondence with the BBC itself and large numbers of personal experiences that make it quite clear how far you've been taken in the FUD:
http://www.bbctvlicence.com/Questions%20and%20ans
http://www.marmalade.net/lime/ (nice collection of personal anecdotes and links to media resources)
http://www.savethepound.fsnet.co.uk/tvl.htm
There are plenty of others, but these should get you started.
"Mistake #1 you opened the door"
Opening a door does not count as an invitation to enter, and employees of the TVL have no more right of entry to your premises than newspaper delivery boys, so one can open the door, tell them to leave, and then close it again.
"they can spot fine you for not co-operating"
They have no more ability to spot-fine people than the milkman has for not cooperating with him. Even the police can't spot-fine for refusing to let them in, and cannot use force to enter private premises unless they have a search or arrest warrant. Despite the official-looking uniforms and an attitude that is calculated to intimidate people into thinking otherwise, TVL employees have precisely the same status as any private citizens: they are not police, and unlike fire fighters, gas board employees, and various others with a statutory right of entry under limited sets of circumstances pertaining to individual or public safety, can neither demand nor force entry without obtaining a court order.
"worse still if it's not your house YOU opened the door and it's YOU who has to pay or go to court"
They can't take you to court without proof that you were receiving broadcasts without a license. This proof can be obtained in two ways: (1) somebody lets them in to gather evidence; or (2) they get a court order, in which case they will be accompanied by a police officer who will say that they have such an order, offer you the chance to read it, and advise you of your legal rights together with the penalties for not complying with the order. It's a good idea to admit them at this point, not only because the penalties for not doing so are severe, but also due to the fact that the policeman is a neutral party who will ensure that the TVL employee doesn't get overzealous in his searches (strict rules govern what they can search for, where they search for it, and how the searches may performed. They cannot for example look under or in mattresses, tear up floors, turn out drawers and cupboards or rifle through stuff that's in them, move heavy furniture around, or damage any of your property).
TVL and its employees rely on FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to perpetuate a common public belief that their powers go far beyond those of mere police, armed forces, or any of the other government-run organisations who are responsible for trivia such as national security rather than the vitally important role of funding the BBC. I therefore humbly ask that you actually check up on things before posting stuff that helps perpetuate the prevailing idea that getting a job with the TVL makes people become some sort of deity who isn't bound by the same laws that everybody else in the UK lives under.
"Yep but the equipment has to be *incapable* of tv reception on examination."
The system as a whole has to be incapable of receiving broadcasts, not the individual components thereof. A receiver with a working antenna that can demonstrably receive broadcasts would count as such as system, but the antenna without a device capable of receiving, or a receiving device without an antenna do not require a license.
"Even a video recorder which has a tv reciever in it is subject to the law."
Only if there is a working antenna for the receiver to be connected to (it does not have to actually be connected, but must have the potential to be so connected).
"If however you have ripped the tv tuner(s) out of your equipment and are running scart / composite only then you are fine."
You don't have to rip the TV tuners out of an anything, because TV tuners in and of themselves cannot receive broadcasts without a suitable antenna, and therefore do not have to be licensed. This means that one can connect (for example) the RF output from a VCR or DVD player to the RF input of a TV without having to pay a license if such a system has no antenna capable of receiving TV broadcasts. Note that not having a lead between an antenna connection point and a receiver that are in the same room doesn't count as being incapable of receiving, and neither does having a portable or easily moved receiver that just happens to be in a room without an antenna connector when the inspector is checking things.
"So all you have to do is denounce your "wife" and ill-begotten family, at some point in your life?"
The Catholic definition of repenting means apologising for what you do, not denouncing others.
"That still sounds an awful lot like a version of telling people who they should and should not associate with."
It actually sounds an awful lot like the Catholic Church telling people what it defines as marriage, i.e. a permanent union between a male Catholic and a female Catholic who swear to be bound by certain rules during a public ceremony. For this to count as them telling people who they can associate with, every association would have to be defined as a permanent union where people swear to be bound by certain rules during an elaborate public ceremony.
"Fortunately over time (like two thousand years) religions seem to get established and people pick out the good bits to believe in and sweep the bad bits under the rug."
Anybody who has studied the history of the currently established religions knows that this process has been happening since they started. The thing that separates cults like scientology from the more established religions is the fact that the entire cult has a single official doctrine which everybody is expected to follow, whereas the major religions started life as a set of distinct groups, each of which had their own interpretations of what the religion was, who it was aimed at, which of a large number of texts were significant, and what ceremonies and practices should be observed by members. Over time, some groups grow, others disappear, new ones form, and old ones change, and while all of these share a core set of beliefs, the way they interpret them can vary so widely that outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that they were different religions (e.g. Islam's Whirling Dervishes and Wahabi).
"Give Scientology a couple of millennia and a bunch of people believing in flying saucers and ancient ghosts might seem harmlessly quaint. Or they might be a cornerstone of society in much of the world."
History indicates that religions which expect everyone to believe exactly the same things and follow exactly the same practices don't ever become mainstream, because there is no room for the personal interpretation that is necessary for the religion _as a whole_ to grow and evolve. And for personal interpretation to be possible, there must be ambiguity in both the nature of what is being worshipped, and any texts that describe it, otherwise it's impossible for new prophets to reinterpret things, and new groups to reinterpret those prophets' reinterpretations in different ways, thereby permitting those with many, many different shades and variations of a basic belief structure to find something somewhere that suits them. Scientology defines too much, and casts too much of what it defines in stone for this sort of ambiguity-based reinterpretation to take place, so it cannot develop into something that offers a variety of options to people with different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds.
The parent was humorously paraphrasing the standard Slashdot advice to software writers and musicians from people who want to pretend that they're doing content producers a favour by copying their work without permission, e.g.:
Software should be given away, and those who write it should make money from selling support.
Music should be given away, and musicians should make money from touring and merchandising.
A sub-notebook with a real keyboard _and_ an iPhone-style multi touch display would be nice to have though, because they could eliminate the usual "mouse pad", thereby leaving more real-estate for a keyboard with a decent set of keys, and If they made the display optionally swivel and fold over backwards, it could also be used as tablet PC with a UI that'd be streets ahead of other tablets.
"That has to be the best reason to study one's religion I've ever heard of. It also makes for interesting conversations: "I studied the holy scriptures so I could have a closer relationship with Jahweh/God/Allah." - "Well, as for me... You see, I think bacon has this in-built [i]deliciousness factor[/i]...""
He reckoned that they were one and the same thing. His reasoning was based on the conviction that God deliberately created humans with the ability to learn more and more about how the world he put them in works, so he would have known that we would rapidly (on God time scales) reach a point where a lot of the rules that were intended to prevent us from doing silly things out of ignorance would no longer be required. It was, he said, a lot like the rules that parents enforce on young children so that they won't harm themselves: a mother might for example prohibit a child of three from entering a kitchen while food is being cooked to prevent them from being burned or scalded, while an older child would only be allowed in under strict supervision, but those who are still older can freely use the kitchen to cook meals for themselves if they wish. And just as a mother wouldn't expect a sixteen year old to require the same level of supervision as younger, less experienced offspring, God doesn't expect those of his children who have reached a level where they can figure out a lot of stuff for themselves to live by the same set of "Don't do that because it's bad" rules he gave to people who were (in a technological sense) still toddlers.
I thought this was an interesting way of looking at things that, for those who believe in an all-powerful creator, made a lot more sense than the traditional "God told a bunch of nomadic goat herders living in tents to do this, so we have to do it as well" viewpoint.