The earliest symbols that might be related to writing are the symbols on tortoise shells in China, which were likely used for divination, so if that's the case, it's magicians.
Anyone with even the slimmest knowledge of history would know that governments were responsible for a considerable number of developments, likely even large scale agriculture and civilization themselves.
Then there are Libertarians, who, instead of history, just repeat idiotic slogans, too stupid and too self-important to even ponder whether the real world resembles them at all.
The alphabet was certainly the next big innovation, phonetic, easier to learn, could be applied to different languages without all the awkwardness one found in applying Sumerian systems to unrelated languages like Akkadian. In the history of writing it was the next big thing up until the printing press. Still, you have to give the earliest inventors of writing the credit, it still stands in my mind as the greatest single achievement of the human mind, from it springing pretty much everything we see today.
Some of the earliest examples of proto-writing in Sumeria appear to be tax records. It is both economies of scale and raw economic need of a large, complex state that drove the need for accurate record keeping. So you're right, it was bureaucrats that likely invented writing.
Hunter-gatherer groups do not have the population size, nor could they sustain the population size necessary to create sufficient specialization for something like scribes or a literate class. Writing had to wait until you had high enough populations and an economic system that could free some group from basic activities like food collection. In other words, you need an urban culture, and even with an urban culture it took a considerable length of time to develop writing. It wasn't an issue of intelligence, it was all down to economics.
I imagine Google would want some real patents. Yahoo may get a bit of push in stock price, but ultimately it will continue it's inevitable decline.
If Yahoo wants to go after those that fucked it over, it could start by hunting down Jerry Yang and selling his organs to the highest bidder. That would probably make the company more money than this idiotic lawsuit.
Look, Zuckerburg didn't invent social networking and neither did twins, and neither did Yahoo. The twins' case was bullshit, and so is Yahoo's.
Yahoo's lawsuits designed to pump up Yahoo's share price so someone with sufficiently deep pockets and small brain will buy them up. I suspect Yahoo is hoping Facebook will, just as SCO hoped that IBM would put them out of their misery and make the executives rich. Yahoo was completely fucked over by Jerry Yang, who refused Microsoft's outrageously large offer, and now it's down to this. This isn't the end of Facebook, this is the end of Yahoo. Either Zuckerburg will call their bluff and that will be it and whatever value is left in the company will be sold piecemeal to the highest bidders. But the company, well, it's worth shit. For chrissakes they're renting Bing as their search engine. They're utterly pointless.
This is the problem though, people want to treat information as physical property with defined rights of ownership. Well unfortunately you physically can't. The best you can do is lock down every information channel and force everything into a DRM mandated system. The damage to the free flow of general ideas (i.e. ones that people may not even be trying to own) is obvious and catastrophic.
Not only that, but after a decade or so of seeing this war out in the open, all DRM and similar systems do is to create an arms race that only ultimately disadvantages non-technical consumers. Look at eBooks. It is trivial to break the locks for anyone with even as a modicum of technical knowledge so that they can view eBooks from one source to another, thus enabling technically-capable consumers, but also, ironically, opening it up to actual pirates.
Nothing is accomplished other than that consumers who can't figure out how to break the locks to do what they want with the data being screwed over.
It breaks the notion of the market as a level playing field. All investors should have access to the same information. Therefore, all investors except those with the inside information, are disadvantaged and thus opened to potential financial harm.
Indeed. Spying, as it were, has been how Google has made its money almost from the moment it came into existence. What shocks me is how many seem to believe that it just started happening.
Oh I'm sorry anonymous assfucker, please elaborate... How are these critters not just repackaged Linux machines with proprietary glue over top of open source solutions?
I agree to a point. Building an iptables firewall isn't exactly rocket science. The reason I've been building my own is because, even with my time, I can usually build a firewall/NAT router/vpn server with equal or better capabilities to any off-the-shelf appliance that would cost me about twice as much. The last router I built cost me about $300 for the parts (a fanless mini-itx with case and SSD drive) and about three hours of my time, and it manages to separate NATed networks as well as the gateway and VPN and web proxy. I use Webmin mainly as a config writer and then just fine-tune that. I'm building two more for remote locations and will probably just clone my current one and change the names and internal subnets, so in reality, the savings become pretty substantial. Plus, being a proper Linux install, when I upgrade to new hardware, I can just throw it on the new equipment, muck about for a few minutes to make sure udev and MAC addresses are all copacetic and have it running.
So far as I could tell from the Sonicwalls I worked with, they were just yet more repackaged Linux-iptables systems with some proprietary glue and some rather expensive subscription services. I've put together just as capable of routers, intrusion detectors and mail proxy servers by just using commonly-available Linux packages. Used to use Slackware as the base, but just use Debian nowadays.
How does Intelligent Design answer the why? Just about every ID document I've read (and I've read a few) specifically disclaim knowledge of who the Intelligent Designer is or its motives. The reason for this is, of course, because it's Creationism with all reference to God removed in the hopes that it could survive a First Amendment challenge when little Johnny Atheist's dad got pissed off at his son being taught by some nutjob school board with Of Pandas and People.
Become disruptive at work, and you get fired. I'm sure if he had distributing Deepak Chopra DVDs the result would have been the same. He was making a nuisance of himself.
Beyond that, a workplace, even a government one, puts limitations on the exercise of your rights. It is not the commons and you're not welcome to take your soapbox and drop it down in the middle of the factory floor.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Judges can be removed. It's not easy, but then again, it's not supposed to be easy. Believe me, in the olden days when judges could be removed at a whim, it wasn't no panacea.
And most likely that's what happened. People began complaining to HR about the guy handing out DVDs and harassing them on Intelligent Design. At some point the workplace situation will become untenable, and the employer's job is to make sure that does not happen.
If you want to hang out on the street outside before and after work handing out DVDs, well, that's your right, but when you walk into the building, you're an employee, and you don't proselytize.
Actually ID is more insidious than even that. The core argument is so vacuous and devoid of anything approaching a prediction or explanation that it can't even really be disproven. Yes, guys like Behe and Dembski will come up with some example, like say, the vertebrate immune system, but really, they're not in fact invoking any particular of aspect of ID to make the claim, they're just saying "ooh, it's too complex!". Worst of all is Behe, who is a molecular biologist, so should know the literature enough to know there are decades worth of studies showing how things like "irreducible complexity" can in fact evolve, and that the very examples he so often invokes were long before his time demonstrated to be evidence FOR biological evolution.
Of course the leaders of the ID movement are a very shifty lot. If they're talking to a crowd of people who tend towards accepting evolution, ID is all about that missing link needed to create life from non-life. If they're giving a speech in a church basement, they basically turn into all-out Creationists.
But I remember many years ago someone on talk,origins summed up ID best when he said ID says nothing more than "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution." That's about as much meat as you'll ever got on the beast. It's nothing more than an appeal to incredulity, built up with lots of pseudo-scientific (in particular irreducible complexity) and pseudo-mathematical (Dembski's information filter) fluff. You'll get more content from a 30 second detergent advertisement.
It sounds like the guy and his lawyer are rather confused themselves. But in the long run, no matter how it works out, he'll have a new career lecturing slackjawed Creationist types on how the ebil gubberment attacks Christianity.
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The earliest symbols that might be related to writing are the symbols on tortoise shells in China, which were likely used for divination, so if that's the case, it's magicians.
Anyone with even the slimmest knowledge of history would know that governments were responsible for a considerable number of developments, likely even large scale agriculture and civilization themselves.
Then there are Libertarians, who, instead of history, just repeat idiotic slogans, too stupid and too self-important to even ponder whether the real world resembles them at all.
The alphabet was certainly the next big innovation, phonetic, easier to learn, could be applied to different languages without all the awkwardness one found in applying Sumerian systems to unrelated languages like Akkadian. In the history of writing it was the next big thing up until the printing press. Still, you have to give the earliest inventors of writing the credit, it still stands in my mind as the greatest single achievement of the human mind, from it springing pretty much everything we see today.
Some of the earliest examples of proto-writing in Sumeria appear to be tax records. It is both economies of scale and raw economic need of a large, complex state that drove the need for accurate record keeping. So you're right, it was bureaucrats that likely invented writing.
Hunter-gatherer groups do not have the population size, nor could they sustain the population size necessary to create sufficient specialization for something like scribes or a literate class. Writing had to wait until you had high enough populations and an economic system that could free some group from basic activities like food collection. In other words, you need an urban culture, and even with an urban culture it took a considerable length of time to develop writing. It wasn't an issue of intelligence, it was all down to economics.
I imagine Google would want some real patents. Yahoo may get a bit of push in stock price, but ultimately it will continue it's inevitable decline.
If Yahoo wants to go after those that fucked it over, it could start by hunting down Jerry Yang and selling his organs to the highest bidder. That would probably make the company more money than this idiotic lawsuit.
Look, Zuckerburg didn't invent social networking and neither did twins, and neither did Yahoo. The twins' case was bullshit, and so is Yahoo's.
Yahoo's lawsuits designed to pump up Yahoo's share price so someone with sufficiently deep pockets and small brain will buy them up. I suspect Yahoo is hoping Facebook will, just as SCO hoped that IBM would put them out of their misery and make the executives rich. Yahoo was completely fucked over by Jerry Yang, who refused Microsoft's outrageously large offer, and now it's down to this. This isn't the end of Facebook, this is the end of Yahoo. Either Zuckerburg will call their bluff and that will be it and whatever value is left in the company will be sold piecemeal to the highest bidders. But the company, well, it's worth shit. For chrissakes they're renting Bing as their search engine. They're utterly pointless.
If Facebook feels that threatened, it can just buy Yahoo. What's the value now, $1.25, or is that including a cheeseburger?
Not only that, but after a decade or so of seeing this war out in the open, all DRM and similar systems do is to create an arms race that only ultimately disadvantages non-technical consumers. Look at eBooks. It is trivial to break the locks for anyone with even as a modicum of technical knowledge so that they can view eBooks from one source to another, thus enabling technically-capable consumers, but also, ironically, opening it up to actual pirates.
Nothing is accomplished other than that consumers who can't figure out how to break the locks to do what they want with the data being screwed over.
It breaks the notion of the market as a level playing field. All investors should have access to the same information. Therefore, all investors except those with the inside information, are disadvantaged and thus opened to potential financial harm.
Translation: I can't.
Indeed. Spying, as it were, has been how Google has made its money almost from the moment it came into existence. What shocks me is how many seem to believe that it just started happening.
Oh I'm sorry anonymous assfucker, please elaborate... How are these critters not just repackaged Linux machines with proprietary glue over top of open source solutions?
I agree to a point. Building an iptables firewall isn't exactly rocket science. The reason I've been building my own is because, even with my time, I can usually build a firewall/NAT router/vpn server with equal or better capabilities to any off-the-shelf appliance that would cost me about twice as much. The last router I built cost me about $300 for the parts (a fanless mini-itx with case and SSD drive) and about three hours of my time, and it manages to separate NATed networks as well as the gateway and VPN and web proxy. I use Webmin mainly as a config writer and then just fine-tune that. I'm building two more for remote locations and will probably just clone my current one and change the names and internal subnets, so in reality, the savings become pretty substantial. Plus, being a proper Linux install, when I upgrade to new hardware, I can just throw it on the new equipment, muck about for a few minutes to make sure udev and MAC addresses are all copacetic and have it running.
So far as I could tell from the Sonicwalls I worked with, they were just yet more repackaged Linux-iptables systems with some proprietary glue and some rather expensive subscription services. I've put together just as capable of routers, intrusion detectors and mail proxy servers by just using commonly-available Linux packages. Used to use Slackware as the base, but just use Debian nowadays.
Good, stupidity and greed deserve their just rewards. I predict a lawsuit in a year demanding that Google put snippets back up.
Don't worry... he's coming.
How does Intelligent Design answer the why? Just about every ID document I've read (and I've read a few) specifically disclaim knowledge of who the Intelligent Designer is or its motives. The reason for this is, of course, because it's Creationism with all reference to God removed in the hopes that it could survive a First Amendment challenge when little Johnny Atheist's dad got pissed off at his son being taught by some nutjob school board with Of Pandas and People.
Become disruptive at work, and you get fired. I'm sure if he had distributing Deepak Chopra DVDs the result would have been the same. He was making a nuisance of himself.
Beyond that, a workplace, even a government one, puts limitations on the exercise of your rights. It is not the commons and you're not welcome to take your soapbox and drop it down in the middle of the factory floor.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Judges can be removed. It's not easy, but then again, it's not supposed to be easy. Believe me, in the olden days when judges could be removed at a whim, it wasn't no panacea.
You do understand that none of your attempts to show Genesis as an allegorical explanation of Big Bang cosmology actually makes sense, right?
Perhaps we could start with discussing your absolutely fucking moronic misunderstanding of Big Bang cosmology.
And most likely that's what happened. People began complaining to HR about the guy handing out DVDs and harassing them on Intelligent Design. At some point the workplace situation will become untenable, and the employer's job is to make sure that does not happen.
If you want to hang out on the street outside before and after work handing out DVDs, well, that's your right, but when you walk into the building, you're an employee, and you don't proselytize.
Actually ID is more insidious than even that. The core argument is so vacuous and devoid of anything approaching a prediction or explanation that it can't even really be disproven. Yes, guys like Behe and Dembski will come up with some example, like say, the vertebrate immune system, but really, they're not in fact invoking any particular of aspect of ID to make the claim, they're just saying "ooh, it's too complex!". Worst of all is Behe, who is a molecular biologist, so should know the literature enough to know there are decades worth of studies showing how things like "irreducible complexity" can in fact evolve, and that the very examples he so often invokes were long before his time demonstrated to be evidence FOR biological evolution.
Of course the leaders of the ID movement are a very shifty lot. If they're talking to a crowd of people who tend towards accepting evolution, ID is all about that missing link needed to create life from non-life. If they're giving a speech in a church basement, they basically turn into all-out Creationists.
But I remember many years ago someone on talk,origins summed up ID best when he said ID says nothing more than "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution." That's about as much meat as you'll ever got on the beast. It's nothing more than an appeal to incredulity, built up with lots of pseudo-scientific (in particular irreducible complexity) and pseudo-mathematical (Dembski's information filter) fluff. You'll get more content from a 30 second detergent advertisement.
It sounds like the guy and his lawyer are rather confused themselves. But in the long run, no matter how it works out, he'll have a new career lecturing slackjawed Creationist types on how the ebil gubberment attacks Christianity.