Indeed. For years now it's been patiently explained over and over and over again what needs to be fixed, and the core team just keeps perpetuating the same crappy nonsense. Since there are other perfectly good languages out there, I see no point in anyone, say, forking PHP.
And when the full effects of AGW come into play, those poor people will be even worse off. Sure, the First World can probably roll with the punches, but for those in the Third World, changes in agricultural belts could spell absolute catastrophe. But hey, short term benefits and fuck the future, huh!
I'm sure they'll do the same thing the Creationists did with Evolution; admit to some very small degree that the theory is correct, but insist that theory only explains minor phenomena.
Indeed. We are now at the point in the anti-science strategy where you admit some minimalistic version of what the science is saying, but spin it so that the admission isn't a big deal.
Now you're adding qualifications to your original claim. Since email and calendars are the most important things most folks are going to want on a portable device such as a phone, with file share access and the like probably further down the list, why is it exactly that mail and calendaring be excluded? Seems to me you're moving the goal post to win the argument.
Indeed. And the one big argument one might have for RT on tablets and the like would be integration into Group Policies, but guess what, RT won''t have Group Policy integration, so there is absolutely no reason that I can see to choose RT devices over Android or iOS. I'm still astonished that, in the one area where Microsoft could really make penetration with its devices, at least into the corporate world, they're doing nothing at all.
Nothing to worry about. The Heartland Institute has their backs. They can safely ruin the environment while the Heartland Institute and like-minded organizations go around teaching school children that God wants us to puke CO2 into the atmosphere and that nothing can possibly go wrong with it.
This is what we in the debate business call misdirection. Rather than conceding the parent's point, the above poster attempts to lead the debate away from that by asking what he feels is a humiliating question.
Sorry, but breeding is not a definitive black and white for species. That two populations can interbreed and produce fertile offspring does not automatically make them the same species (grizzly bears and polar bears), any more than an inability to interbreed means they're not (ie. chihuahuas and Great Danes).
The species concept is considerably more complex than inter fertility, and is really a spectrum of traits that will always be somewhat subjective. Nature doesn't follow nice clean Linnean lines.
I'm sorry. Could you first show where you got your idea of evolution. No one said a bird is going to evolve into a non-bird in a single generation, or even a small number. You appear to be using a definition of evolution invented by Creationists.
Evolution is this, in simplest terms:
The genetic makeup of a population changes over time.
That's it. That being said, there are numerous examples of speciation:
But before you get into that, I actually urge you to actually go and read some literature on evolution by biologists, so you don't come on Internet forums and look like an idiot. The questions you've asked suggest you actually have not even the slightest idea what evolution is.
Most important of them all, from the point of view of Biblical interpretation, was St. Augustine, who made it very clear that throwing out obviously faulty or ludicrous interpretations of Scripture was doing a great disservice to Christianity. The underlying notion in Catholicism that the natural world and Scripture are both true, and where there seems to be some conflict, it most certainly must be with the interpreter, is a rather important one. Not that the Catholic Church has always stuck to that, but at least it's an ideal that theoretically means there should be no conflict. Beyond that, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have never advocated Sola Scriptura, and considering that Christianity itself was born out of Greco-Roman Judaism, which certainly had never advocated using one book alone for theological purposes, let alone strangling that book with literalistic interpretations, one has to view certain Christian groups' insistence upon literal interpretations as a symptom of the often self-serving and inconsistent way in which such churches approach theology.
The older churches like the Catholic Church have long struggled with the tendency of some of the Protestant churches to interpret the Bible in bizarre and often inconsistent ways, so scientists and educators need not feel they are the first people to battle this nonsense.
I would generally view all of this with the purely intellectual interest of an outsider, save that the Creationists seem so hell bent on forcing their ludicrous ideas on children, or at least trying to deprive children of any mention of the theory of life accepted by biologists almost to a man.
In general, these groups rely upon the fact that most of their members won't bother checking citations. In my long-ago youth, I was a Jehovah's Witness (though I stopped disbelieving in evolution when I was about nine years old), and they had anti-evolution books chalked full of out of context quotes and various other dodgy references. They even claimed that Richard Dawkins thought evolution was science fiction (quote mining his introduction to Selfish Gene). They could do these sorts of things because they knew that virtually no JW was going to check those references. In fact, they were basically warned against doing so, lest Satan enter their hearts.
It was all pretty pathetic, and, as I said, by the time I was nine, I had already started to doubt it all, mainly by reading a book on human evolution in the school library. By the time I was sixteen and had read some literature on comparative religious studies and mythology, I was well on the road to atheism. When I made my break, I told them exactly why; their religion was nonsense, their Biblical interpretation was nonsensical by Augustine standards and that they were making their own holy book into a ridiculous mockery by their own dishonesty and ludicrous interpretations.
It certainly disproves virtually all literal interpretations of Genesis, and archaeology takes care of a fair chunk of Exodus as an actual historical account.
You're not differentiating between Communism as a economic-political theory and how it has in fact been implemented. The first issue one must look at with the implementation of Marxism is that it, unlike Marx's theory, it has only ever been implemented in primarily agrarian economies, which was in fact exactly the opposite of what Marx theorized was the pathway to a Communist state. Agrarian societies, primarily feudal in nature, were too undeveloped in Marx's mind, and would have to go through the various stages of development into Capitalist societies before they would be ready for the transition to Communism.
What mucked up Marx was the failed revolutions in Europe in the mid 19th century, where the political and aristocratic classes in many countries figured out really quickly that if they didn't liberalize in various ways, the next set of revolutions would topple them. Thus we saw a whole host of political reforms in various industrialized European countries; new constitutions, increased numbers of eligible voters, stronger labor laws, a push to end to illiteracy and other problems that had plagued the underclasses for centuries. In effect, if for no other reason than to preserve the European states as they stood in the mid-19th century, some of Marx's and indeed most socialists' complaints were at least partially answered.
So, what was left by the early 20th century were countries like Russia and China, still dominated by agrarian society and economy, despite strong efforts to industrialize, and where the complaints were fundamentally against the relics of feudalism (a bad word, I know, but the best to describe the situation in those countries), and not against any bourgeoisie capitalist class, which barely existed in either country. In other words, Communism was the wrong solution for those countries, who were really a century or two behind the fully industrialized states in political, economic and social development. So what you ended up with was Marxist governments in Russia and China literally having to create an industrial working class from the small periphery that had existed when they seized power; forcing the evolution of a society to the point where Communism might even make sense.
Now that's not to say Communism would ever work. I don't think it would, not on the vast scale of a nation state. Still, not all of Marx's ideas were rubbish, and his view of history is a compelling, if somewhat simplistic one. And there's no denying that class struggle has played a vast role in many societies; extant and historical.
Morality is not some fixed set of principles. It changes over time. In many places in the United States, for instance, interracial marriages were not only illegal, but viewed as deeply immoral. Now, of course, we see that view as bigoted and immoral. There has been a shift.
At the end of the day, a society decides what is right and what is wrong. There may be some near-universal moral precepts (though not as many as once thought), but in general, morals have differed substantially in time and place.
So, to answer the question, if a society decides that intellectual property is no longer deemed important, or even desirable, then the moral landscape has changed. Trying to enforce an antiquated moral code through force is likely futile in most cases. We don't burn witches anymore.
And even if an artist becomes a Beatles or an Elvis, the record companies still try to screw them. Even the biggest acts, like, say, the Beatles have had to go after their recording companies for unpaid royalties and violations of contract. Of course, the difference, as always, is that when Johnny Q. One-hit goes after Unimegaversal Music Gluttony Group, his odds of success are low to nil, whereas when Bobby J. Twenty-Number-Ones go against the same company, he can afford a major team of lawyers and forensic accountants.
Perhaps the point is in the middle. Yes, we should pay, but should we pay as much as we are, and on the flip side, should the artist be paying the middle man so much to distribute a product at pre-Internet costs when the actual costs of distribution have substantially dropped.
The problem here that I see is that everyone is so fixated on the personal piracy issue that they've lost sight of the big picture:
1. The media companies (music and film in particular) have built up elaborate systems whose purposes, in no small part, are to minimize the payments to artists and to maximize what the consumer pays. This has involved, over time, everything from outrageously one-sided recording contracts, creative accounting (literally in many cases keeping two sets of books in violation of every notion of good accounting and most certainly in violation of pretty much all statutes anywhere you go), hiding sales to distort royalty reports to artists, in some cases actually not reporting sales at all, violating fiduciary obligations, and so on and so forth.
Now obviously, in one respect, charging the customer as much as you can isn't precisely wrong, but at the same time going out of your way to break the back of the customer when alternate distribution means that rob you completely of profit doesn't seem very wise. Look at TV. A lot of people are pirating American or British TV shows not because of any particular desire to defraud anyone, but rather because the rights holders refuse to make product available in a timely fashion. The media giants put a lot of money and effort in the pursuit of piracy, but for the most part, have made only half-hearted overtures to their customers to find a middle ground. Even when they do, they cannot help but try to play the game the way it has been for decades, becoming heavy handed with legitimate online distribution points (look how they absolutely trashed Internet radio, to what end I cannot figure out).
There has to come a point when an industry remains so unwilling to compromise, to accept new technologies and to adjust accordingly, that both the consumer and the artist have to ask themselves "Why am dealing with these guys?" Consumers in large numbers have already asked the question, and have responded. Artists are beginning to as well, but typically they are caught in the middle in a fight between the distributor and the consumer, and inevitably will suffer the most.
Time will tell how this shakes out, but I really do predict that companies like Apple and Google will tire of the constant battle to give consumers what they want, and ultimately will begin to look at those vast warchests of cash they have built up and begin to think that maybe they should be starting their own production companies and record labels. It's not quite there yet, but the dinosaurs have constantly and unremittingly tried to cut them off at the knees, and there will be a point where Apple and Google too will tire of this.
Let's put this in perspective. For the bulk of human history, we have possessed no copyright laws and no large media companies. Homer did not need an agent, Mozart and Michelangelo did the bulk of their work for hire, and relied upon patrons and works for hire. Some of the towering achievements of human artistic endeavor were done with none of the artificial systems put in place over the last few centuries. Shakespeare wrote all his plays for the sole purpose of having something for his theater to put on, and gained his coin from the performances (and apparently did rather well). The debate we are having, no matter how ethical or moral, or how much we may feel it is important, is an artificial debate. Art does not require copyright to exist. It never did and it never will.
I'm not quite clear here why I have been modded down. I didn't say that I approved of the fact that probably any President over the last half century would have done exactly the same thing if they could have, I'm merely stating a fact.
There are some real fucking retards getting mod points. Fucking hell you pathetic stunted neocortex-deprived halftards, grab a fucking clue. Making a statement like this is not a judgment call. Grow up you pathetic ideological loons. Reality doesn't give one sweet fucking shit about your political leanings.
No wonder there are so many problems in the world, too many adults have the emotional makeup of brain-damaged eight year olds.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. For years now it's been patiently explained over and over and over again what needs to be fixed, and the core team just keeps perpetuating the same crappy nonsense. Since there are other perfectly good languages out there, I see no point in anyone, say, forking PHP.
And when the full effects of AGW come into play, those poor people will be even worse off. Sure, the First World can probably roll with the punches, but for those in the Third World, changes in agricultural belts could spell absolute catastrophe. But hey, short term benefits and fuck the future, huh!
I'm sure they'll do the same thing the Creationists did with Evolution; admit to some very small degree that the theory is correct, but insist that theory only explains minor phenomena.
Indeed. We are now at the point in the anti-science strategy where you admit some minimalistic version of what the science is saying, but spin it so that the admission isn't a big deal.
They ruined that this morning with another pointless Raspberry Pi article.
But I agree. The only thing more retarded than this would be a "Who Would Win In A No-Rules Cage Match - Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Job's Zombie?"
Now you're adding qualifications to your original claim. Since email and calendars are the most important things most folks are going to want on a portable device such as a phone, with file share access and the like probably further down the list, why is it exactly that mail and calendaring be excluded? Seems to me you're moving the goal post to win the argument.
Which is why every second person walking past my office has an iPhone.
Indeed. And the one big argument one might have for RT on tablets and the like would be integration into Group Policies, but guess what, RT won''t have Group Policy integration, so there is absolutely no reason that I can see to choose RT devices over Android or iOS. I'm still astonished that, in the one area where Microsoft could really make penetration with its devices, at least into the corporate world, they're doing nothing at all.
Nothing to worry about. The Heartland Institute has their backs. They can safely ruin the environment while the Heartland Institute and like-minded organizations go around teaching school children that God wants us to puke CO2 into the atmosphere and that nothing can possibly go wrong with it.
This is what we in the debate business call misdirection. Rather than conceding the parent's point, the above poster attempts to lead the debate away from that by asking what he feels is a humiliating question.
Ah yes, the weekly Raspberry Pi post.
Sorry, but breeding is not a definitive black and white for species. That two populations can interbreed and produce fertile offspring does not automatically make them the same species (grizzly bears and polar bears), any more than an inability to interbreed means they're not (ie. chihuahuas and Great Danes).
The species concept is considerably more complex than inter fertility, and is really a spectrum of traits that will always be somewhat subjective. Nature doesn't follow nice clean Linnean lines.
I'm sorry. Could you first show where you got your idea of evolution. No one said a bird is going to evolve into a non-bird in a single generation, or even a small number. You appear to be using a definition of evolution invented by Creationists.
Evolution is this, in simplest terms:
The genetic makeup of a population changes over time.
That's it. That being said, there are numerous examples of speciation:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
But before you get into that, I actually urge you to actually go and read some literature on evolution by biologists, so you don't come on Internet forums and look like an idiot. The questions you've asked suggest you actually have not even the slightest idea what evolution is.
Most important of them all, from the point of view of Biblical interpretation, was St. Augustine, who made it very clear that throwing out obviously faulty or ludicrous interpretations of Scripture was doing a great disservice to Christianity. The underlying notion in Catholicism that the natural world and Scripture are both true, and where there seems to be some conflict, it most certainly must be with the interpreter, is a rather important one. Not that the Catholic Church has always stuck to that, but at least it's an ideal that theoretically means there should be no conflict. Beyond that, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have never advocated Sola Scriptura, and considering that Christianity itself was born out of Greco-Roman Judaism, which certainly had never advocated using one book alone for theological purposes, let alone strangling that book with literalistic interpretations, one has to view certain Christian groups' insistence upon literal interpretations as a symptom of the often self-serving and inconsistent way in which such churches approach theology.
The older churches like the Catholic Church have long struggled with the tendency of some of the Protestant churches to interpret the Bible in bizarre and often inconsistent ways, so scientists and educators need not feel they are the first people to battle this nonsense.
I would generally view all of this with the purely intellectual interest of an outsider, save that the Creationists seem so hell bent on forcing their ludicrous ideas on children, or at least trying to deprive children of any mention of the theory of life accepted by biologists almost to a man.
In general, these groups rely upon the fact that most of their members won't bother checking citations. In my long-ago youth, I was a Jehovah's Witness (though I stopped disbelieving in evolution when I was about nine years old), and they had anti-evolution books chalked full of out of context quotes and various other dodgy references. They even claimed that Richard Dawkins thought evolution was science fiction (quote mining his introduction to Selfish Gene). They could do these sorts of things because they knew that virtually no JW was going to check those references. In fact, they were basically warned against doing so, lest Satan enter their hearts.
It was all pretty pathetic, and, as I said, by the time I was nine, I had already started to doubt it all, mainly by reading a book on human evolution in the school library. By the time I was sixteen and had read some literature on comparative religious studies and mythology, I was well on the road to atheism. When I made my break, I told them exactly why; their religion was nonsense, their Biblical interpretation was nonsensical by Augustine standards and that they were making their own holy book into a ridiculous mockery by their own dishonesty and ludicrous interpretations.
It certainly disproves virtually all literal interpretations of Genesis, and archaeology takes care of a fair chunk of Exodus as an actual historical account.
They need to take courses in a lot of things. Basic logic would be a very good start.
You're not differentiating between Communism as a economic-political theory and how it has in fact been implemented. The first issue one must look at with the implementation of Marxism is that it, unlike Marx's theory, it has only ever been implemented in primarily agrarian economies, which was in fact exactly the opposite of what Marx theorized was the pathway to a Communist state. Agrarian societies, primarily feudal in nature, were too undeveloped in Marx's mind, and would have to go through the various stages of development into Capitalist societies before they would be ready for the transition to Communism.
What mucked up Marx was the failed revolutions in Europe in the mid 19th century, where the political and aristocratic classes in many countries figured out really quickly that if they didn't liberalize in various ways, the next set of revolutions would topple them. Thus we saw a whole host of political reforms in various industrialized European countries; new constitutions, increased numbers of eligible voters, stronger labor laws, a push to end to illiteracy and other problems that had plagued the underclasses for centuries. In effect, if for no other reason than to preserve the European states as they stood in the mid-19th century, some of Marx's and indeed most socialists' complaints were at least partially answered.
So, what was left by the early 20th century were countries like Russia and China, still dominated by agrarian society and economy, despite strong efforts to industrialize, and where the complaints were fundamentally against the relics of feudalism (a bad word, I know, but the best to describe the situation in those countries), and not against any bourgeoisie capitalist class, which barely existed in either country. In other words, Communism was the wrong solution for those countries, who were really a century or two behind the fully industrialized states in political, economic and social development. So what you ended up with was Marxist governments in Russia and China literally having to create an industrial working class from the small periphery that had existed when they seized power; forcing the evolution of a society to the point where Communism might even make sense.
Now that's not to say Communism would ever work. I don't think it would, not on the vast scale of a nation state. Still, not all of Marx's ideas were rubbish, and his view of history is a compelling, if somewhat simplistic one. And there's no denying that class struggle has played a vast role in many societies; extant and historical.
It would be based on units sold, not on number of people who own tablets.
So now you're being a Communist to want a decent wage ommensurate with your skills?
Morality is not some fixed set of principles. It changes over time. In many places in the United States, for instance, interracial marriages were not only illegal, but viewed as deeply immoral. Now, of course, we see that view as bigoted and immoral. There has been a shift.
At the end of the day, a society decides what is right and what is wrong. There may be some near-universal moral precepts (though not as many as once thought), but in general, morals have differed substantially in time and place.
So, to answer the question, if a society decides that intellectual property is no longer deemed important, or even desirable, then the moral landscape has changed. Trying to enforce an antiquated moral code through force is likely futile in most cases. We don't burn witches anymore.
And even if an artist becomes a Beatles or an Elvis, the record companies still try to screw them. Even the biggest acts, like, say, the Beatles have had to go after their recording companies for unpaid royalties and violations of contract. Of course, the difference, as always, is that when Johnny Q. One-hit goes after Unimegaversal Music Gluttony Group, his odds of success are low to nil, whereas when Bobby J. Twenty-Number-Ones go against the same company, he can afford a major team of lawyers and forensic accountants.
Perhaps the point is in the middle. Yes, we should pay, but should we pay as much as we are, and on the flip side, should the artist be paying the middle man so much to distribute a product at pre-Internet costs when the actual costs of distribution have substantially dropped.
The problem here that I see is that everyone is so fixated on the personal piracy issue that they've lost sight of the big picture:
1. The media companies (music and film in particular) have built up elaborate systems whose purposes, in no small part, are to minimize the payments to artists and to maximize what the consumer pays. This has involved, over time, everything from outrageously one-sided recording contracts, creative accounting (literally in many cases keeping two sets of books in violation of every notion of good accounting and most certainly in violation of pretty much all statutes anywhere you go), hiding sales to distort royalty reports to artists, in some cases actually not reporting sales at all, violating fiduciary obligations, and so on and so forth.
Now obviously, in one respect, charging the customer as much as you can isn't precisely wrong, but at the same time going out of your way to break the back of the customer when alternate distribution means that rob you completely of profit doesn't seem very wise. Look at TV. A lot of people are pirating American or British TV shows not because of any particular desire to defraud anyone, but rather because the rights holders refuse to make product available in a timely fashion. The media giants put a lot of money and effort in the pursuit of piracy, but for the most part, have made only half-hearted overtures to their customers to find a middle ground. Even when they do, they cannot help but try to play the game the way it has been for decades, becoming heavy handed with legitimate online distribution points (look how they absolutely trashed Internet radio, to what end I cannot figure out).
There has to come a point when an industry remains so unwilling to compromise, to accept new technologies and to adjust accordingly, that both the consumer and the artist have to ask themselves "Why am dealing with these guys?" Consumers in large numbers have already asked the question, and have responded. Artists are beginning to as well, but typically they are caught in the middle in a fight between the distributor and the consumer, and inevitably will suffer the most.
Time will tell how this shakes out, but I really do predict that companies like Apple and Google will tire of the constant battle to give consumers what they want, and ultimately will begin to look at those vast warchests of cash they have built up and begin to think that maybe they should be starting their own production companies and record labels. It's not quite there yet, but the dinosaurs have constantly and unremittingly tried to cut them off at the knees, and there will be a point where Apple and Google too will tire of this.
Let's put this in perspective. For the bulk of human history, we have possessed no copyright laws and no large media companies. Homer did not need an agent, Mozart and Michelangelo did the bulk of their work for hire, and relied upon patrons and works for hire. Some of the towering achievements of human artistic endeavor were done with none of the artificial systems put in place over the last few centuries. Shakespeare wrote all his plays for the sole purpose of having something for his theater to put on, and gained his coin from the performances (and apparently did rather well). The debate we are having, no matter how ethical or moral, or how much we may feel it is important, is an artificial debate. Art does not require copyright to exist. It never did and it never will.
I'm not quite clear here why I have been modded down. I didn't say that I approved of the fact that probably any President over the last half century would have done exactly the same thing if they could have, I'm merely stating a fact.
There are some real fucking retards getting mod points. Fucking hell you pathetic stunted neocortex-deprived halftards, grab a fucking clue. Making a statement like this is not a judgment call. Grow up you pathetic ideological loons. Reality doesn't give one sweet fucking shit about your political leanings.
No wonder there are so many problems in the world, too many adults have the emotional makeup of brain-damaged eight year olds.
So let me get this straight, you thought any US administration was just going to sit by and let Iran gain nuclear capabilities.