"If by "never" you mean "in the last 100 years" and by "arms" you mean "guns", I think you'll find that the restrictions were very different pre-WW2, definitely pre-WW1."
You're pretty much correct. The first British gun licensing laws were enacted in 1870, but they were essentially a revenue generation tool. You had to pay ten shillings for the right to carry guns around in public places, but could keep as many at home as you wanted without one, and the licenses were handed out at post offices to anyone who could pay for them. The first actual control legislation was in 1903, when certain classes of pistol could only be sold to people who produced a valid game or gun license, although once again such licenses were extremely easy to obtain, and any other sort of gun could be bought without them. True gun control didn't happen until 1920, and was largely a reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution, where private gun ownership played a significant role in overthrowing the Czar, and the British government feared that the millions of recently demobbed (and therefore extremely cheap) weapons from WWI would be used to start a massive armed revolt.
"We in England have never had the right to bear arms"
I suggest you check your own history, paying particular attention to the 1689 Bill Of Rights, which (among various other things) gives the right to have armaments for personal defence.
"You do realize that Google is static images taken on a single day right?"
I do indeed. However, it was you who made the comparison with Britain's street cameras, which aren't still images, hence my reply.
"Also, my original argument about delineating your own privacy stands."
Don't assume that all other countries take personal privacy as lightly as the US does. Britain, the great surveillance society, prohibits photographing the inside of a private residence without explicit permission, even if you can see inside it from a public street, and the police are as bound by this as everybody else. France, Germany, and Italy have strict laws that protect their citizens' right to privacy, and such rights are in Spain's constitution, so that's five countries where Google publishing views through the windows of private residences could be a criminal act, not a civil tort, and I'm pretty sure that it'd be the same in lots of other places.
"Ask England. London and other cities are wired to the tits with CCTV, microphones, etc. The populace there doesn't seem to have a problem with it."
I'd bet a lot more of them would have an issue with it if the output of those cameras and microphones was being published on the Internet web-cam style, instead of being watched by a couple of bored plods whose high point of an eight hour night shift is seeing an inebriated buffoon vomit iguana tikka massala dissolved in beer all over two girls who are getting out of a taxi.
"Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you enough to kill themselves over it. "
That will only stop suicide terrorists, who are actually a rather small and notably desperate subset of terrorists as a whole. Most terrorists are, and always have been, of the McVeigh / Unabomber / IRA variety, and have no intention whatsoever of being killed along with their victims.
"we are talking about the middle east here. A part of the world which has been at war on and off for longer than many of the countries there have existed."
The same can be said of Europe, the Far East, Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, etc., etc., etc.
"there's also a practical argument that it's simply a lot easier to enforce pharmaceutical IP than music and video."
The products that the IP applies to are easier to enforce, not the IP itself. Patents on physical products and trademarks are still _intellectual_ property, and are therefore simply information that's as easy to duplicate as any other sort of information. Those annoying spams advertising cheap Viagra and Ciallis aren't actually selling real Viagra and Ciallis -- they're counterfeits that are in many cases packaged to look like the real product, and some of them are even chemically more or less identical (although many aren't). Pharmaceutical IP is therefore being violated every day, and the spam we Westerners receive that advertises it is just the very small tip of a massive worldwide iceberg.
" I think the practical argument is fairly powerful, and I don't think we should be such purists about our beliefs that we have to throw out all IP protection in every sphere just because they no longer make sense in one sphere"
It's currently a powerful one in the West _today_, but the West is a small part of a much bigger world where counterfeit goods of all types are produced in vast quantities on a daily basis, and "today" is a small window of time, and not an indicator that the same prevailing conditions will exist tomorrow, next week, or in ten years. The entire edifice of IP is dependent on a willingness to respect it, and if we stop respecting some of it, we'll introduce cracks that will weaken the whole lot. Globalisation has resulted in the the world's industrial base moving from its traditional Western seat to countries with lower wages, whose cultures see the whole idea of "intellectual property" is an alien concept that rich, powerful foreigners force on them. They are paying lip service to WIPO and the Berne convention because they're currently dependent on our markets for their goods, but every day that goes by sees their dependence on us being reduced, and us becoming more dependant on their cheap goods to maintain our high standards of living. It is therefore inevitable that we'll reach a tipping point where their own markets will have grown to the point where they don't need us anymore, but we'll still need them, and that's when a willingness to eliminate any IP that's hard to enforce would come back to bite us, because they'll quite reasonably say that our notable inability to enforce IP with them means that they don't have to respect any of it.
"I'm not comfortable with the government making the call on which drugs are important enough to protect their IP and which ones aren't"
Yet you seem perfectly comfortable making you own judgements about what classes of things do and do not deserve to have their IP protected, e.g.:
"There seems (to me) to be a material difference between drug development and sheer entertainment regardless."
Drugs such as Viagra are also intended solely for entertainment, because the people it's mostly prescribed to have no intention whatsoever of using sex for procreation. And while it's easy to argue that Viagra has a potentially valuable social role because in some cases it helps to sustain lasting relationships, there are many people who will claim that particular pieces of music or movies helped them form or sustain a lasting relationship too.
It's these boundary cases which make it very difficult to objectively argue that one type of IP deserves to be protected by a government-granted monopoly but certain others don't, because any criteria that may play a role in deciding what is and isn't "worthy" are entirely subjective. If for example the justification for protecting all drugs is that a small percentage of them can save lives, then the massive amounts of expensive technical research in fields that have no direct life saving potential obviously has no value, and therefore doesn't deserve any protection at all. I shouldn't have to point out that such an attitude in the past would have resulted in many technologies that later turned out to have medical applications not being developed, and this includes many that are vital to the process of researching and manufacturing new drugs. This includes more than a few that were originally solely intended for use in entertainment.
"There might be one or two plant that do small runs of CD's but I would bet that lot are imported from somewhere like china"
China's low wages only produce dramatic cost reductions in fairly labour-intensive manufacturing processes. Commercial CD/DVD pressing is highly automated, so the tiny amounts that might be saved are more than offset by the risks of sending masters to a country whose government turns a blind eye to industrial-scale commercial piracy operations. The media companies might act stupidly in a lot of ways, but they aren't silly enough to press their products in a country where the pirates are big and wealthy enough to use professional translators, script writers, and actors that are often better than the studios themselves use for dubbing foreign soundtracks into Chinese.
"But beware, oh you petty consumer if you try to go to China to buy at chinese prices! That's (obviously) illegal."
Any consumer can go to China and buy things for their own use without any penalty other than having to pay applicable taxes and duties, assuming of course that they're things which can legally be brought into the UK -- they can also buy items by mail order from abroad under similar conditions. However, companies who are importing goods for resale are subject to a much more stringent and complex set of regulations to ensure that the products comply with whatever national health, safety, environmental, and consumer protection laws may apply to them, and in the case of copyrighted works, that permission has been obtained from the relevant licensing bodies to sell them in the UK. So while you could buy a few CDs and DVDs in Hong Kong and bring them into Britain quite legally (assuming of course that they're all different -- two dozen copies of the same album or movie will be treated with suspicion), a company that sells such items within the UK without permission from copyright holders is acting illegally.
"I do think that the fact that music is entertainment while pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining makes a big difference."
Some pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining, but the vast majority of them are for non-serious temporary conditions (or in many cases, the symptoms thereof), or faddish psychological inventions such as Attention Deficit Disorder, which earlier generations of teachers called "DLLSD" (Disruptive Lazy Little Sod Disorder), which they cured cheaply and quickly by forcefully applying a wooden ruler to the head of the afflicted pupil.
I get lots of them, together with several daily messages telling me about how great life would be if only I lost weight. The puzzling thing about it is how all those people know that I'm morbidly obese, and have a tiny, flaccid todger...
"I guess you missed my point or I didn't make it clear."
I wasn't arguing with your post as a whole, but used one line of it to point out a common fallacy, i.e. the belief that a statistical correlation proves something other than a statistical correlation. I can for example produce a graph which conclusively shows that, on the face of the planet as a whole, ambient noise levels are higher during daylight hours than at night, but this does not prove that light is noisy, that it conducts sound, or anything else beyond the fact that most places are noisier during the day. The relationship between the two variables is via an "AND" operator, not a "because" or "therefore", and this is true for any set of variables that do not have a provable two-way relationship (i.e. where raising or lowering any one variable results in a corresponding change in all the others, allowing for "threshold effects" in which certain phenomena are only apparent when some other variable rises above / falls below a certain level).
What the above means is that the statement "Windows has the most malware because it has the highest desktop market share" would only be true if "A decline in the amount of new malware for Windows would show that it has a declining desktop market share" was also demonstrably true. The same goes for statements such as "OS X is more secure than Windows because it has no malware", which ignores the possibility of threshold effects such as malware authors (who are becoming more and more commercially oriented) deciding that the potential for reward isn't yet high enough to justify the amount of effort involved in learning to exploit an unfamiliar system that's currently being used on two CPU types with completely different instruction sets.
"He may have further refined his theories in subsequent years, but his book "The Intelligent Universe" can easily leave you with the idea that life on earth was the result of advanced, intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy deliberately sending microbes into space to "seed" other planets. Whether or not these "seeds" were engineered specifically for the job, intelligence was involved."
It's actually his later works that contain the "directed panspermia" ideas rather than his earlier ones. Evidence forced Hoyle to accept that his steady-state model of the universe was wrong (as he says in the book itself), so his original ideas about the "seeds of life" being a basic property of a universe that had no beginning and no end were obviously also wrong. Some have said the he never fully recovered from this, hence the fact that the book contains so many assertions which were refuted by evidence that was well known to people working in the field for some years before it was published.
His "Mathematics Of Evolution" is in my opinion rather better, because unlike "The Intelligent Universe", it wasn't primarily aimed at an "educated layman" audience, and therefore contains mathematical proofs instead of the (IMO sometimes silly) analogies he used in the other work.
"You seem to have misunderstood me. My point was that his rejection of evolution was limited in scope to chemical evolution."
I obviously did misunderstand you, as I thought you were saying that Hoyle supported chemical evolution, but not macro-evolution. However, it isn't really correct to say that he only rejected chemical evolution, because Hoyle also disliked the idea of mutation as a major driving force for macro-evolution, and therefore expended considerable effort trying to disprove that it was anything beyond a minor and very occasional factor in both of "The intelligent Universe" and "The Mathematics Of Evolution". Some of the points he made are very interesting, although it's also fair to say that a good many others were once again refuted by evolutionary biologists who cite evidence that was known when Hoyle wrote it.
"How do you figure [that Darwin had a harder time getting accepted than Hoyle]? Last time I heard, origins was a choice of DNA world, RNA world, protein world, and maybe clay world. Seeds from space and supernatural intervention weren't on the menu."
Nobody knew about DNA or RNA when "the Origin Of Species" was published, so Darwin's supporters couldn't use it in their arguments. Chemists were familiar with proteins (although the name wasn't coined until shortly before Darwin published his work), but nobody knew much about them beyond the fact that they were biological, and changed in certain ways when heated, so they couldn't be used to support anything either. Supernatural explanations were not only on the menu, but firmly entrenched in the scientific mainstream, where Creationism was the prevailing scientific explanation for the existence of all forms of life on Earth (although Ussher's "young Earth" ideas that placed its age at six thousands of years had been universally rejected by this time).
To give some idea of how much resistance to Darwin's book there was from both scientists and society in general, I shall take the liberty of quoting from Huxley's eulogy to him:
"None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world".
"I never claimed he did. Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution, either. What's your point?"
My point was that evolutionary biologists were well aware of panspermia long before Hoyle came on the scene, and it already had a number of prominent supporters in the scientific community (and indeed still does, e.g. the late Carl Sagan). The "primeval soup" ideas of biogenesis were not therefore simple pieces of entrenched scientific dogma that had established themselves without any opposition, but a model that had become accepted by p
Temper tantrums probably work at getting your mother to buy you a chocolate bar, but they're an extremely poor debating tactic.
"If we were to take your insistence on not calling a duck a duck"
It seems to be you who insists on calling an amoeba a duck because ducks are made of cells, so they're just amoebas with some "syntactic sugar".
"a class can be modelled in C and it's still a sight more elegant than it is in some hack like Perl that supports classes "natively"
I didn't claim that any Turing-complete programming language couldn't be used to model anything given sufficient effort, and mentioned no languages other than C and C++. So we have yet more straw men, although at least this time they're liberally laced with entertainingly petulant and profanity-strewn tantrums.
"I will point out, however, that Intelligent Design and Creationism are not the exclusive property of theists. Sir Fred Hoyle and the "panspermia" proposal are an example of a prominent scientific atheist and a naturalistic intelligent design theory (limited to chemical evolution in scope)."
Hoyle's panspermia was nothing like you are presenting it. He believed that the "seeds" for for life are a property of the universe, which his steady-state model claimed has always existed, and will continue to do so for eternity. Hoyle's universe was thus not created intelligently or otherwise, because it's always been there, together with the seeds of life, which were also not created -- indeed, one of the driving forces for his theories was to refute the very concepts you claim he was supporting. Note also that rather than being "limited to chemical evolution", Hoyle thoroughly rejected that concept, although he fully accepted Darwinian evolution because, unlike ID / creationists, he understood the fact that life origins and evolution theory are separate fields, and did not therefore attempt to use one as a straw man against the other.
"His ideas were not accepted, of course"
As is always the case with science, he had some prominent supporters and some prominent detractors -- Darwin had a much harder job getting his ideas accepted than Hoyle did. Note also that Hoyle didn't invent the concept of panspermia, because it dates back to at least the 5th century BC, and was quite a popular idea during the 18th and 19th centuries.
"I wonder whether his audacity in questioning such sacred cows (and providing quotable material to the infidel creationists) didn't cost him Nobel Prize recognition in the end."
If this was actually the case, then how did Francis Crick, a prominent supporter (and possibly co-originator) of directed panspermia, get a Nobel prize?
"is that because the ideas are profoundly and obviously wrongheaded, or simply because it's professional suicide for anyone less renowned than Sir Fred Hoyle to confess public doubt in evolution?"
Fred Hoyle never expressed any doubts whatsoever about evolution - indeed, he proposed the idea that viruses and other organic matter falling on to the Earth and causing new epidemics among species (which either adapt and survive or die out) might act as one of its fundamental driving mechanisms.
I didn't bother reading the rest of your post, because it's obvious that you are both a liar and a fool. Everybody on Slashdot is by definition on the Internet, and can therefore use Google etc. to check up on Hoyle's ideas for themselves, and then know that you are being completely disingenuous. This type of tripe might work when preaching to the converted, but only an utter fool would post it on a forum where the average IQ is above that of a cardboard box, and people can quickly and easy see for themselves that your argument is built on a foundation of obvious lies.
"If anything this shows that OSX still doesn't have near the market share some people seem to think."
This would indeed be true if the act of writing malware was a quest that earned a +5 Amulet Of Knowing Real User Numbers which gives them magical abilities that people who don't write malware lack. If however we reluctantly accept the fact that malware writers don't have such wondrous artefacts, then we must also accept that Windows' market dominance and its total dominance of the malware sector are merely a statistical correlation, and correlations do not in and of themselves imply, let alone prove, causality. Exactly the same data could for example be used to support the following hypothesis, which uses the same fallacious logic as your statement:
Weeklekin's Stupid Malware Hypothesis
The notable statistical correlation between market share of desktop operating systems and the amount of malware that's available for them shows that users both expect and demand a wide range of high quality malware applications. Microsoft's latest version of Windows, known as Vista, has many documented problems with a large number of popular pieces of malware, and this has resulted in several major OEMs taking the unprecedented step of retrospectively offering their customers the option of Windows XP, which has proven its unrivalled excellence as a malware host over the last six years. UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems such as Apple's OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux will therefore continue to be unpopular in both domestic and business settings unless the designers of both the systems themselves, and various programming tools for them, work harder at achieving the level of malware-friendliness that users of Windows XP enjoy.
"Try reading the GObject, GLib and GTK+ documentation and you'll see what I mean by OOP in C, or even try Googling for "object oriented c"."
I wrote nothing whatsoever about OO or C in general, but deliberately restricted my responses to classes, which as I said, C does not have. The rest of your comments are therefore a straw man.
Perhaps it's the fact that C hasn't got classes which is stopping him.
"Or use an existing one like that found in glib?"
There aren't any classes in glib because C doesn't support classes. This is why various supersets that add class support such as C++ and Objective-C were designed.
"I wrote my own string class in C that has a similar API to the glib one."
You're either a troll, or have been somehow isolated from everything that's been happening in programming over the last few decades, and therefore really don't know the difference between a class and a collection of functions. For your sake, I really do hope that it's the former.
"all without the overhead of C++"
I assume you're referring to overhead that adds important stuff for building _classes_ such as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, which C, through its virtue of having no direct support for _classes_, conveniently avoids.
"The term "radical" means that you and your group are in the practice of killing people who don't follow your beliefs."
I suggest you check any reputable dictionary for an actual definition of "radical" before posting balderdash like this. The rest of what you have written, which is based on not knowing what the term means, is therefore utter tripe.
The criminal element will mug them for the cameras, which will then turn up at car boot sales all over the country (" 'Ands free video cameras, on'y fifty nicker, as used by officious bastards, first five customer get a free traffic warden's 'ead").
"Now, don't get me wrong, I love Linux and would never go back to that POS Windows even if Bill Gates were personally paying me."
I'm a shameless whore who would happily use Windows _and_ say how much better it is than Macs and Linux in return for a big wad of cash from Bill, Steve, or any other vastly wealthy Microsoft person who's thinking "Hey, I'm so bored with looking at all this money. I wonder if there's anybody on Slashdot who'd be willing to sell their integrity for the odd supertanker-load of bank notes that won't fit into the vault I made by discarding the Earth's molten core".
"When I first read that, I read it as Cheney dying in the office of vice president."
I can see how it could easily be interpreted in that way.
"Maybe that was an incorrect reading, and it meant Cheney dying in office after Bush was already gone."
This is the way I read it, i.e. Bush dies, becomes incapacitated, gets impeached, or is otherwise unable to continue as President, so Cheney takes over, and then himself becomes unable to fulfil the duties of the office before Congress has accepted his nomination for VP.
"Maybe that's what the original post meant, but it wasn't at all clear on that point. While the original post may not be technically "wrong", it is certainly lacking some important details."
Well, to be fair, the original poster was simply pointing out a (to him rather horrific) possible implication of Cheney's notably fragile health in a fairly humorous way (hence the Nancy Logosi bit). I don't think he intended to provoke a serious discussion of the related US constitutional issues, and neither did I intend such with my reply.
Slashdot Mirror
"If by "never" you mean "in the last 100 years" and by "arms" you mean "guns", I think you'll find that the restrictions were very different pre-WW2, definitely pre-WW1."
You're pretty much correct. The first British gun licensing laws were enacted in 1870, but they were essentially a revenue generation tool. You had to pay ten shillings for the right to carry guns around in public places, but could keep as many at home as you wanted without one, and the licenses were handed out at post offices to anyone who could pay for them. The first actual control legislation was in 1903, when certain classes of pistol could only be sold to people who produced a valid game or gun license, although once again such licenses were extremely easy to obtain, and any other sort of gun could be bought without them. True gun control didn't happen until 1920, and was largely a reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution, where private gun ownership played a significant role in overthrowing the Czar, and the British government feared that the millions of recently demobbed (and therefore extremely cheap) weapons from WWI would be used to start a massive armed revolt.
"We in England have never had the right to bear arms"
I suggest you check your own history, paying particular attention to the 1689 Bill Of Rights, which (among various other things) gives the right to have armaments for personal defence.
"You do realize that Google is static images taken on a single day right?"
I do indeed. However, it was you who made the comparison with Britain's street cameras, which aren't still images, hence my reply.
"Also, my original argument about delineating your own privacy stands."
Don't assume that all other countries take personal privacy as lightly as the US does. Britain, the great surveillance society, prohibits photographing the inside of a private residence without explicit permission, even if you can see inside it from a public street, and the police are as bound by this as everybody else. France, Germany, and Italy have strict laws that protect their citizens' right to privacy, and such rights are in Spain's constitution, so that's five countries where Google publishing views through the windows of private residences could be a criminal act, not a civil tort, and I'm pretty sure that it'd be the same in lots of other places.
"Ask England. London and other cities are wired to the tits with CCTV, microphones, etc. The populace there doesn't seem to have a problem with it."
I'd bet a lot more of them would have an issue with it if the output of those cameras and microphones was being published on the Internet web-cam style, instead of being watched by a couple of bored plods whose high point of an eight hour night shift is seeing an inebriated buffoon vomit iguana tikka massala dissolved in beer all over two girls who are getting out of a taxi.
"Terrorism can only be diminished by not having people who hate you enough to kill themselves over it. "
That will only stop suicide terrorists, who are actually a rather small and notably desperate subset of terrorists as a whole. Most terrorists are, and always have been, of the McVeigh / Unabomber / IRA variety, and have no intention whatsoever of being killed along with their victims.
"we are talking about the middle east here. A part of the world which has been at war on and off for longer than many of the countries there have existed."
The same can be said of Europe, the Far East, Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, etc., etc., etc.
"there's also a practical argument that it's simply a lot easier to enforce pharmaceutical IP than music and video."
The products that the IP applies to are easier to enforce, not the IP itself. Patents on physical products and trademarks are still _intellectual_ property, and are therefore simply information that's as easy to duplicate as any other sort of information. Those annoying spams advertising cheap Viagra and Ciallis aren't actually selling real Viagra and Ciallis -- they're counterfeits that are in many cases packaged to look like the real product, and some of them are even chemically more or less identical (although many aren't). Pharmaceutical IP is therefore being violated every day, and the spam we Westerners receive that advertises it is just the very small tip of a massive worldwide iceberg.
" I think the practical argument is fairly powerful, and I don't think we should be such purists about our beliefs that we have to throw out all IP protection in every sphere just because they no longer make sense in one sphere"
It's currently a powerful one in the West _today_, but the West is a small part of a much bigger world where counterfeit goods of all types are produced in vast quantities on a daily basis, and "today" is a small window of time, and not an indicator that the same prevailing conditions will exist tomorrow, next week, or in ten years. The entire edifice of IP is dependent on a willingness to respect it, and if we stop respecting some of it, we'll introduce cracks that will weaken the whole lot. Globalisation has resulted in the the world's industrial base moving from its traditional Western seat to countries with lower wages, whose cultures see the whole idea of "intellectual property" is an alien concept that rich, powerful foreigners force on them. They are paying lip service to WIPO and the Berne convention because they're currently dependent on our markets for their goods, but every day that goes by sees their dependence on us being reduced, and us becoming more dependant on their cheap goods to maintain our high standards of living. It is therefore inevitable that we'll reach a tipping point where their own markets will have grown to the point where they don't need us anymore, but we'll still need them, and that's when a willingness to eliminate any IP that's hard to enforce would come back to bite us, because they'll quite reasonably say that our notable inability to enforce IP with them means that they don't have to respect any of it.
"I'm not comfortable with the government making the call on which drugs are important enough to protect their IP and which ones aren't"
Yet you seem perfectly comfortable making you own judgements about what classes of things do and do not deserve to have their IP protected, e.g.:
"There seems (to me) to be a material difference between drug development and sheer entertainment regardless."
Drugs such as Viagra are also intended solely for entertainment, because the people it's mostly prescribed to have no intention whatsoever of using sex for procreation. And while it's easy to argue that Viagra has a potentially valuable social role because in some cases it helps to sustain lasting relationships, there are many people who will claim that particular pieces of music or movies helped them form or sustain a lasting relationship too.
It's these boundary cases which make it very difficult to objectively argue that one type of IP deserves to be protected by a government-granted monopoly but certain others don't, because any criteria that may play a role in deciding what is and isn't "worthy" are entirely subjective. If for example the justification for protecting all drugs is that a small percentage of them can save lives, then the massive amounts of expensive technical research in fields that have no direct life saving potential obviously has no value, and therefore doesn't deserve any protection at all. I shouldn't have to point out that such an attitude in the past would have resulted in many technologies that later turned out to have medical applications not being developed, and this includes many that are vital to the process of researching and manufacturing new drugs. This includes more than a few that were originally solely intended for use in entertainment.
"There might be one or two plant that do small runs of CD's but I would bet that lot are imported from somewhere like china"
China's low wages only produce dramatic cost reductions in fairly labour-intensive manufacturing processes. Commercial CD/DVD pressing is highly automated, so the tiny amounts that might be saved are more than offset by the risks of sending masters to a country whose government turns a blind eye to industrial-scale commercial piracy operations. The media companies might act stupidly in a lot of ways, but they aren't silly enough to press their products in a country where the pirates are big and wealthy enough to use professional translators, script writers, and actors that are often better than the studios themselves use for dubbing foreign soundtracks into Chinese.
"But beware, oh you petty consumer if you try to go to China to buy at chinese prices! That's (obviously) illegal."
Any consumer can go to China and buy things for their own use without any penalty other than having to pay applicable taxes and duties, assuming of course that they're things which can legally be brought into the UK -- they can also buy items by mail order from abroad under similar conditions. However, companies who are importing goods for resale are subject to a much more stringent and complex set of regulations to ensure that the products comply with whatever national health, safety, environmental, and consumer protection laws may apply to them, and in the case of copyrighted works, that permission has been obtained from the relevant licensing bodies to sell them in the UK. So while you could buy a few CDs and DVDs in Hong Kong and bring them into Britain quite legally (assuming of course that they're all different -- two dozen copies of the same album or movie will be treated with suspicion), a company that sells such items within the UK without permission from copyright holders is acting illegally.
"I do think that the fact that music is entertainment while pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining makes a big difference."
Some pharmaceuticals are life-sustaining, but the vast majority of them are for non-serious temporary conditions (or in many cases, the symptoms thereof), or faddish psychological inventions such as Attention Deficit Disorder, which earlier generations of teachers called "DLLSD" (Disruptive Lazy Little Sod Disorder), which they cured cheaply and quickly by forcefully applying a wooden ruler to the head of the afflicted pupil.
I get lots of them, together with several daily messages telling me about how great life would be if only I lost weight. The puzzling thing about it is how all those people know that I'm morbidly obese, and have a tiny, flaccid todger...
"I guess you missed my point or I didn't make it clear."
I wasn't arguing with your post as a whole, but used one line of it to point out a common fallacy, i.e. the belief that a statistical correlation proves something other than a statistical correlation. I can for example produce a graph which conclusively shows that, on the face of the planet as a whole, ambient noise levels are higher during daylight hours than at night, but this does not prove that light is noisy, that it conducts sound, or anything else beyond the fact that most places are noisier during the day. The relationship between the two variables is via an "AND" operator, not a "because" or "therefore", and this is true for any set of variables that do not have a provable two-way relationship (i.e. where raising or lowering any one variable results in a corresponding change in all the others, allowing for "threshold effects" in which certain phenomena are only apparent when some other variable rises above / falls below a certain level).
What the above means is that the statement "Windows has the most malware because it has the highest desktop market share" would only be true if "A decline in the amount of new malware for Windows would show that it has a declining desktop market share" was also demonstrably true. The same goes for statements such as "OS X is more secure than Windows because it has no malware", which ignores the possibility of threshold effects such as malware authors (who are becoming more and more commercially oriented) deciding that the potential for reward isn't yet high enough to justify the amount of effort involved in learning to exploit an unfamiliar system that's currently being used on two CPU types with completely different instruction sets.
"He may have further refined his theories in subsequent years, but his book "The Intelligent Universe" can easily leave you with the idea that life on earth was the result of advanced, intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy deliberately sending microbes into space to "seed" other planets. Whether or not these "seeds" were engineered specifically for the job, intelligence was involved."
It's actually his later works that contain the "directed panspermia" ideas rather than his earlier ones. Evidence forced Hoyle to accept that his steady-state model of the universe was wrong (as he says in the book itself), so his original ideas about the "seeds of life" being a basic property of a universe that had no beginning and no end were obviously also wrong. Some have said the he never fully recovered from this, hence the fact that the book contains so many assertions which were refuted by evidence that was well known to people working in the field for some years before it was published.
His "Mathematics Of Evolution" is in my opinion rather better, because unlike "The Intelligent Universe", it wasn't primarily aimed at an "educated layman" audience, and therefore contains mathematical proofs instead of the (IMO sometimes silly) analogies he used in the other work.
"You seem to have misunderstood me. My point was that his rejection of evolution was limited in scope to chemical evolution."
I obviously did misunderstand you, as I thought you were saying that Hoyle supported chemical evolution, but not macro-evolution. However, it isn't really correct to say that he only rejected chemical evolution, because Hoyle also disliked the idea of mutation as a major driving force for macro-evolution, and therefore expended considerable effort trying to disprove that it was anything beyond a minor and very occasional factor in both of "The intelligent Universe" and "The Mathematics Of Evolution". Some of the points he made are very interesting, although it's also fair to say that a good many others were once again refuted by evolutionary biologists who cite evidence that was known when Hoyle wrote it.
"How do you figure [that Darwin had a harder time getting accepted than Hoyle]? Last time I heard, origins was a choice of DNA world, RNA world, protein world, and maybe clay world. Seeds from space and supernatural intervention weren't on the menu."
Nobody knew about DNA or RNA when "the Origin Of Species" was published, so Darwin's supporters couldn't use it in their arguments. Chemists were familiar with proteins (although the name wasn't coined until shortly before Darwin published his work), but nobody knew much about them beyond the fact that they were biological, and changed in certain ways when heated, so they couldn't be used to support anything either. Supernatural explanations were not only on the menu, but firmly entrenched in the scientific mainstream, where Creationism was the prevailing scientific explanation for the existence of all forms of life on Earth (although Ussher's "young Earth" ideas that placed its age at six thousands of years had been universally rejected by this time).
To give some idea of how much resistance to Darwin's book there was from both scientists and society in general, I shall take the liberty of quoting from Huxley's eulogy to him:
"None have fought better, and none have been more fortunate, than Charles Darwin. He found a great truth trodden underfoot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world".
"I never claimed he did. Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution, either. What's your point?"
My point was that evolutionary biologists were well aware of panspermia long before Hoyle came on the scene, and it already had a number of prominent supporters in the scientific community (and indeed still does, e.g. the late Carl Sagan). The "primeval soup" ideas of biogenesis were not therefore simple pieces of entrenched scientific dogma that had established themselves without any opposition, but a model that had become accepted by p
"Oh fuck off you pedant."
Temper tantrums probably work at getting your mother to buy you a chocolate bar, but they're an extremely poor debating tactic.
"If we were to take your insistence on not calling a duck a duck"
It seems to be you who insists on calling an amoeba a duck because ducks are made of cells, so they're just amoebas with some "syntactic sugar".
"a class can be modelled in C and it's still a sight more elegant than it is in some hack like Perl that supports classes "natively"
I didn't claim that any Turing-complete programming language couldn't be used to model anything given sufficient effort, and mentioned no languages other than C and C++. So we have yet more straw men, although at least this time they're liberally laced with entertainingly petulant and profanity-strewn tantrums.
"I will point out, however, that Intelligent Design and Creationism are not the exclusive property of theists. Sir Fred Hoyle and the "panspermia" proposal are an example of a prominent scientific atheist and a naturalistic intelligent design theory (limited to chemical evolution in scope)."
Hoyle's panspermia was nothing like you are presenting it. He believed that the "seeds" for for life are a property of the universe, which his steady-state model claimed has always existed, and will continue to do so for eternity. Hoyle's universe was thus not created intelligently or otherwise, because it's always been there, together with the seeds of life, which were also not created -- indeed, one of the driving forces for his theories was to refute the very concepts you claim he was supporting. Note also that rather than being "limited to chemical evolution", Hoyle thoroughly rejected that concept, although he fully accepted Darwinian evolution because, unlike ID / creationists, he understood the fact that life origins and evolution theory are separate fields, and did not therefore attempt to use one as a straw man against the other.
"His ideas were not accepted, of course"
As is always the case with science, he had some prominent supporters and some prominent detractors -- Darwin had a much harder job getting his ideas accepted than Hoyle did. Note also that Hoyle didn't invent the concept of panspermia, because it dates back to at least the 5th century BC, and was quite a popular idea during the 18th and 19th centuries.
"I wonder whether his audacity in questioning such sacred cows (and providing quotable material to the infidel creationists) didn't cost him Nobel Prize recognition in the end."
If this was actually the case, then how did Francis Crick, a prominent supporter (and possibly co-originator) of directed panspermia, get a Nobel prize?
"is that because the ideas are profoundly and obviously wrongheaded, or simply because it's professional suicide for anyone less renowned than Sir Fred Hoyle to confess public doubt in evolution?"
Fred Hoyle never expressed any doubts whatsoever about evolution - indeed, he proposed the idea that viruses and other organic matter falling on to the Earth and causing new epidemics among species (which either adapt and survive or die out) might act as one of its fundamental driving mechanisms.
I didn't bother reading the rest of your post, because it's obvious that you are both a liar and a fool. Everybody on Slashdot is by definition on the Internet, and can therefore use Google etc. to check up on Hoyle's ideas for themselves, and then know that you are being completely disingenuous. This type of tripe might work when preaching to the converted, but only an utter fool would post it on a forum where the average IQ is above that of a cardboard box, and people can quickly and easy see for themselves that your argument is built on a foundation of obvious lies.
"If anything this shows that OSX still doesn't have near the market share some people seem to think."
This would indeed be true if the act of writing malware was a quest that earned a +5 Amulet Of Knowing Real User Numbers which gives them magical abilities that people who don't write malware lack. If however we reluctantly accept the fact that malware writers don't have such wondrous artefacts, then we must also accept that Windows' market dominance and its total dominance of the malware sector are merely a statistical correlation, and correlations do not in and of themselves imply, let alone prove, causality. Exactly the same data could for example be used to support the following hypothesis, which uses the same fallacious logic as your statement:
Weeklekin's Stupid Malware Hypothesis
The notable statistical correlation between market share of desktop operating systems and the amount of malware that's available for them shows that users both expect and demand a wide range of high quality malware applications. Microsoft's latest version of Windows, known as Vista, has many documented problems with a large number of popular pieces of malware, and this has resulted in several major OEMs taking the unprecedented step of retrospectively offering their customers the option of Windows XP, which has proven its unrivalled excellence as a malware host over the last six years. UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems such as Apple's OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux will therefore continue to be unpopular in both domestic and business settings unless the designers of both the systems themselves, and various programming tools for them, work harder at achieving the level of malware-friendliness that users of Windows XP enjoy.
"Try reading the GObject, GLib and GTK+ documentation and you'll see what I mean by OOP in C, or even try Googling for "object oriented c"."
I wrote nothing whatsoever about OO or C in general, but deliberately restricted my responses to classes, which as I said, C does not have. The rest of your comments are therefore a straw man.
"Why not just write a C string class?"
Perhaps it's the fact that C hasn't got classes which is stopping him.
"Or use an existing one like that found in glib?"
There aren't any classes in glib because C doesn't support classes. This is why various supersets that add class support such as C++ and Objective-C were designed.
"I wrote my own string class in C that has a similar API to the glib one."
You're either a troll, or have been somehow isolated from everything that's been happening in programming over the last few decades, and therefore really don't know the difference between a class and a collection of functions. For your sake, I really do hope that it's the former.
"all without the overhead of C++"
I assume you're referring to overhead that adds important stuff for building _classes_ such as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, which C, through its virtue of having no direct support for _classes_, conveniently avoids.
"All SCMS managed to do was make people not buy standalone audio cd burners"
If that's the case, then why do so many companies still make them?
"They often contain a 5.1 mix, which is technically challenging (and expensive) to produce."
It's no more technically challenging or expensive for most music than any other mix of a multitrack source.
"The term "radical" means that you and your group are in the practice of killing people who don't follow your beliefs."
I suggest you check any reputable dictionary for an actual definition of "radical" before posting balderdash like this. The rest of what you have written, which is based on not knowing what the term means, is therefore utter tripe.
The criminal element will mug them for the cameras, which will then turn up at car boot sales all over the country (" 'Ands free video cameras, on'y fifty nicker, as used by officious bastards, first five customer get a free traffic warden's 'ead").
"Now, don't get me wrong, I love Linux and would never go back to that POS Windows even if Bill Gates were personally paying me."
I'm a shameless whore who would happily use Windows _and_ say how much better it is than Macs and Linux in return for a big wad of cash from Bill, Steve, or any other vastly wealthy Microsoft person who's thinking "Hey, I'm so bored with looking at all this money. I wonder if there's anybody on Slashdot who'd be willing to sell their integrity for the odd supertanker-load of bank notes that won't fit into the vault I made by discarding the Earth's molten core".
"When I first read that, I read it as Cheney dying in the office of vice president."
I can see how it could easily be interpreted in that way.
"Maybe that was an incorrect reading, and it meant Cheney dying in office after Bush was already gone."
This is the way I read it, i.e. Bush dies, becomes incapacitated, gets impeached, or is otherwise unable to continue as President, so Cheney takes over, and then himself becomes unable to fulfil the duties of the office before Congress has accepted his nomination for VP.
"Maybe that's what the original post meant, but it wasn't at all clear on that point. While the original post may not be technically "wrong", it is certainly lacking some important details."
Well, to be fair, the original poster was simply pointing out a (to him rather horrific) possible implication of Cheney's notably fragile health in a fairly humorous way (hence the Nancy Logosi bit). I don't think he intended to provoke a serious discussion of the related US constitutional issues, and neither did I intend such with my reply.