I know! It throws a monkey wrench into that entire kettle of fish! There's no foothold you could sink your teeth into! It blows your mind from the ground up!
But you're not wrong. The article is nothing but a series of false dichotomies, where really a tertium quid is usually the more accurate viewpoint.
Take abortion vs. the death penalty. Personally I'm both pro-life in the anti-death penalty and the anti-abortion sense. But not for the same reasons, and I understand perfectly the thinking of those who don't share my anti-death penalty sentiments. Pro-life opinion regards the unborn as innocent human life. Pro-death penalty opinion regards the criminal to be executed as very guilty indeed. The two cannot automatically be regarded as moral equivalents, and it's not reasonable to expect them to be.
Same with the on-topic (more or less) information question. There is information that ought to be public and information that ought to be private. Information that affects public policy in a democracy, information that controls how the machines we use and depend on -- sometimes for our livlihoods, sometimes for our lives -- this kind of information, that directly affects us and the public sphere, ought to be free. My bank balance, on the other hand, is none of anyone else's business unless I choose to make it so.
The PhD who taught my introductory CS course -- the head of the Math Department -- felt it so not beneath him to present this knowledge to me and my classmates that he put special effort into the course to make it enjoyable. Even now, with much coursework and a 20 year professional career behind me, I still recall that class with pleasure.
Yes, that will make for some players who are orders of magnitude more powerful than others. But MMOGs are also clearly designed with these players in mind, or at least those I've tried have been. It seems as if the majority of the maps, at least the more interesting parts of them, are designed expressly for the power gamers with few or none at all for the casual player. (Who is not the same as the novice player.) Not to mention extended campaigns requiring long hours of continuous cooperative play -- who, with a life, has time for that? I want to be able to log on, slay some bad guys, hang out with some cool people for a while, maybe for an hour or two at a time, and then go to bed. Show me a game where I can do that and maybe I'll play it.
Someone has already pointed out that the "checks and balances" are intended to counterpoise the branches against each other, and that parties weren't even contemplated. Even within the legislative branch the two houses balance against each other, although not as strongly as they once did thanks to the 17th Amendment.
It's not always possible to predict exactly how any particular appointee will affect the balance of the court. O'Connor was supposed to be a conservative, a Reagan appointee, but she turned out to be a very middle-of-the-road "swing vote". Fact is -- and I'm sure that some will be disappointed to hear this -- most SCOTUS decisions are based on law and precedent, not politics, and Justices are affected more by what theory under which they believe the Constitution should be interpreted than the political issue of the moment.
There are, of course, individual exceptions to this, and occasionally very disturbing ones, but law rather than politics is the general rule.
I don't believe your energy equation is correct here. Among other things such as more efficient processes, some crops yield far more oil per hectare than others and that can make a huge difference. See the Wikipedia article.
Also, from where are you? I find your use of the (US) term "English major" surprising juxtaposed with your (UK) spelling of the word "catalogue".
"Catalog" is a common neologism, but "catalogue" is correct American English, as are "analogue" and "dialogue". "Analog" and "dialog" are actually incorrect in most contexts, even in the U.S.
Incidentally, there's nothing particularly improper about "Where are you from?" The stilted constructions resulting from the absurd and artificial rule that sentences may not end with prepositions are far worse than the disease they purport to cure. This "disease" is non-conformity with Latin grammar, which is something inherent to Germanic languages and for which correction is not necessarily to be desired. Winston Churchill once told an advisor who edited one of his speeches to eliminate an ultimate preposition, "This is just the kind of thing up with which I will not put!"
The rule not to split infinitives is of similar provenance. You can't split infinitives at all in Latin even if you wanted to: it's unitary form there. Not so in English, where splitting them is perfectly natural. "Boldly to go where no man has gone before!" lacks a bit of rhetorical force, doesn't it?
It would IMO, and it's unfortunate that a law intended to do something else ensnares such people as well. (Not to mention those cases where a person was genuinely misled as to the age of his sex partner.) These laws were aimed at actual violent rapists and pedophiles, crimes with an extremely high recidivism rate after time has been served.
In other words, sad experience has shown that it's very rare that people guilty of such crimes can be trusted not to commit them again no matter how long their incarceration. It seems therefore only prudent that they be "flagged" somehow. Laws requiring this are called "Megan's Laws" after the 8-year old victim of a twice-convicted (but released) child rapist, whose kidnapping, rape and murder prompted the passage of the first such law.
Well, okay, the subject is ancient tech put into practice by modern geeks. Consider the amount of jargon in modern geekspeak. Did you really think that kind of thing was new? Hell, this is simple. Look into the jargon of 19th Century sailing if you want to see something complicated.
Good jargon (as opposed to the kind of polysyllabic blather adopted by some of the soft sciences as counterfeit jargon) is a set of shorthand phrases with specific, non-ambiguous technical meanings and as such tends to be opaque to the layman. In this particular case we're not even reaching that far: the words are simply archaic and were once in common use.
People have been getting cancer for all of human history, even when everyone ate "organic" food because there was nothing else to eat and there were no "chemicals" in the environment because we hadn't invented them yet. It happens. Life's hard sometimes.
Chemo giveth, and chemo taketh away. I know one sufferer from lung cancer who didn't go into remission until he took himself off chemo, which was wrecking everything else in his body, and relied strictly on naturopathy and prayer. So maybe it cured you. Or maybe another less damaging cure was also available and this one just cost more and was more toxic.
Of course, anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything either way, does it?
Oh, let me guess why they don't do this. Could it be becuase they don't give a flying fuck? Possibly. Just like they don't care about the downtowns they destroy, the employees they underpay, or the conditions in the Chinese sweatshops that make the products they sell. Next to that, placating a handful of amateur photographers who take the trouble to make their work professional quality is small potatoes.
Being the biggest in the world means you don't have to care.
So I gathered. That was stated in the quote I presented from the article. It's nice if MS is now "getting it". It would have been far nicer had they "gotten it" some time ago. The presumption -- and again I can't determine for certain whether it's on the part of the article writer or MS -- that such events would normally be only for people responsible for "security features" but on this occasion (Huzzah!) it wasn't, was my point of departure.
Chill? My remarks were quite moderate, and I'm hardly a member of the anti-MS/. claque. If I were, I'd hardly be using XP at home, would I?
The second day drew about 400 rank-and-file Windows engineers, including people who don't necessarily focus on security features in their day-to-day work.
"Don't necessarily focus on security features"? If this is just the reporter making up his own description it's not so bad. But if he's just echoing what he was told by Microsoft or whoever his source was, then they're looking at this backward and probably have been for a long time.
Anyone who touches that code for any reason at all has to keep security in mind every time he does it. It doesn't matter if he's responsible for authentication or whatever else they're including under the rubric of "security features". Any bit of code is a potential vulnerability. It only takes one buffer overflow, one set of bounds that's not checked, one line of code that doesn't validate the terminator on an input text string, to create one. And then it's a security problem for everybody. If making non "security feature" programmers aware of these issues is a new thing at MS, they've been doing this all wrong for years. (As many have suspected, but seeing it possibly confirmed is still a bit of a shock.)
I'm not talking about the religiously motivated circumcision common among Semitic peoples, but about the routine medical circumcisions performed on most males in the US at birth. This didn't come about until the late 19th-early 20th century for the reasons I stated. It was to prevent "masturbatory insanity." No, I shit you not.
The objection is to unnecessary circumcision, not those that are needed. Circumcision is the only prophylactic surgery that's not regarded as medically unethical. Are we to cut off every body part that's not immediately useful on the off-chance it might become diseased? How about automatic mastectomies for all post-menopausal women? It'll prevent lots of breast cancers. No?
Fact is, routine circumcision was instituted for a completely spurious reason, and one that most people would not now even consider desirable. (It was believed to reduce masturbation. The opposite is in fact true.) Modern rationalization for continuing the practice are different, but the only reason they exist is because there's this huge population of mutilated men to study. No doubt if for some reason female circumcision were to become common you could find plenty of justification for continuing it long after whatever initial stupid reason you had for doing it in the first place fell out of favor.
The US is the only industrialized nation where routine circumcisions are performed at birth. It is a surgery, and there are risks associated, especially when they're performed by doctors. (Jewish mohels are typically better at it, with lower complication rates and less pain to the recipient.) The benefits, such as they are, simply do not justify the risks or the undesirable side effects.
Ya know, it may well. But "oestrus" has nothing to do with eggs, at least etymologically. It's from a root meaning "frenzy". Draw your own conclusions.;)
I made no implication that Easter has no origin outside Christianity. I stated it outright.
You correctly identified one misstatement that resulted from an incomplete edit. I meant to say, "'Passover' and 'Easter' are the same word in Greek," which is perfectly true.
That "Vine's" reference is ridiculously Anglocentric. Only in English and German (languages not spoken by most of Western European Christianity) is the day called something like "Easter", and even if you don't accept an early origin for Pascha you have to at least admit it was celebrated before Nicaea -- which was itself held centuries before the Saxons were converted. (They weren't even living in England yet at the time -- which, of course, did not bear that name.) The references we have from Nicaea and prior always describe Pascha as the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord. Here is a second century homily for the occasion.
"Easter" as a term for this holiday did not exist until the Saxons became Christians themselves. Any earlier connection with any similar-sounding words (a very unreliable guide to etymology, incidentally, absent any other evidence) goddess names, etc. is therefore wholly illusory. Anyone who claims there is one is doing so with no evidence at all to back him up. If this is an example of the reasoning to be found in The Two Babylons, Anglocentrism and all, it doesn't speak very well of that book. You can hardly expect me to accept it as a source, in the face of primary sources to the contrary.
As to the "connection" you posit between Eostremonath and Pascha, there is none except for the simple fact that, based on the Nicene computations, Pascha would nearly always have fallen within Eostremonath which corresponds more or less to our April. We don't need Bede to know that since the month itself is attested elsewhere. The problem with this ersatz goddes is exactly that she is not attested elsewhere.
I notice you're not telling me what edition of the Britannica you're quoting, and I suspect it to be fairly old. A lot of old manuscripts have been discovered since the 19th century. Even if references to holy days are scanty, we still have witness from the Apostolic era of Sunday worship and twice a week fasting. Melito's Peri Pascha was first preached in 190. This is within the lifetime of Irenaeus of Lyons, a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna who was himself a disciple of John the Apostle and Evangelist, and also within the lifetimes of other great early Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Hermas the author of The Shepherd, and shortly after the martyrdom of Justin. This feast was clearly celebrated from a very early date.
At least until the polar ice cap melts. At that point if he wants to stay at the North Pole he'll need to invest in a houseboat or something. Personally, I think it'd be easier just to move to Canada.
Oh, please. This ridiculous old saw about Constantine isn't even remotely credible. It has its origins with Gibbon, who has been thoroughly discredited in this instance. Christianity had just been through the worst persecution it had ever experienced, with so many martyrs made that the Coptic Church still counts its years from the accession of the emperor responsible for it, Diocletian. (They call it the Age of the Martyrs.) Some of the participants at Nicaea were missing eyes or limbs from the tortures they suffered rather than give up the faith. It's absurd to claim that these people would just roll over because an emperor told them to. It would have been contrary to everything they believed in and inconsistent with how they had behaved up to that time.
Constantine wanted order in the Church which was wracked with controversy over a particular theological issue, so he called the council. After convening it, he left the discussions up to the bishops, who ended up condemning Arius. Constantine was so uninterested in the theological determination that he was actually baptized on his deathbed by an Arian bishop, a fact that cannot be reconciled with the notion that he was responsible for the council's decision. It actually took a second council to finally put an end to the schism.
Easter wasn't invented at Nicaea. It had been celebrated since the second century at least -- probably earlier; this is just when the avaiable documentary evidence was written. Of course, it wasn't called Easter, and wouldn't be until a few hundred years later when some obscure Germanic tribes were converted. It still isn't called that in most parts of the world. It's ancient and proper name by which it was known to the Fathers at Nicaea is Pascha, the Greek adaptation of the Hebrew Pesach: Passover. "Passover" and "Easter" are the same word in the Greek Bible. (What actually was done at Nicaea relative to Pascha was that a consistent method of determining when it should fall was decided upon. Before that there were a variety of methods, and different local churches were celebrating it on different days. But they were celebrating it.)
There's no credible cultural or etymological link between "Ishtar" (whom Constantine did not worship at any point in his life) and "Easter". "Easter" comes from the Anglo-Saxon month "Eostremonath", of obscure meaning. Bede claimed it referred to a goddess named Eostre, but he is writing generations after his people converted and not from living memory. There's no contemporary mention of this goddess at all, and modern scholars have concluded that he was just guessing and was probably wrong.
Christianity always had a distinctive organization from Judaism -- note from Acts 15 that questions were not referred to the Sanhedrin but to a Christian council, with the decision announced not by a kohan or rabbi, but by the local bishop. It grew even moreso after the destruction of the Temple in 70 and the levelling of Jerusalem in 120 when the Jewish population was scattered. It was clearly not Jewish by the time Nicaea was held, even among its Semitic adherents.
If this is your myth, you can live with it if you want, but please don't try to present it as fact. It just isn't.
You got that straight, buster! Measuring the airspeed velocity of coconut-laden swallows is not for undergrads! You must be a fully-trained scientist. With scales, and at least one duck.
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Is this all over Scandanavia? Hmm. My sister-in-law is from Sweden. I wonder how they are about immigration....?
Well, this is a good start.
So how usual is it to be publicly intoxicated in Denmark? (Actually you get that in SF too, but mostly South of Market...)
But you're not wrong. The article is nothing but a series of false dichotomies, where really a tertium quid is usually the more accurate viewpoint.
Take abortion vs. the death penalty. Personally I'm both pro-life in the anti-death penalty and the anti-abortion sense. But not for the same reasons, and I understand perfectly the thinking of those who don't share my anti-death penalty sentiments. Pro-life opinion regards the unborn as innocent human life. Pro-death penalty opinion regards the criminal to be executed as very guilty indeed. The two cannot automatically be regarded as moral equivalents, and it's not reasonable to expect them to be.
Same with the on-topic (more or less) information question. There is information that ought to be public and information that ought to be private. Information that affects public policy in a democracy, information that controls how the machines we use and depend on -- sometimes for our livlihoods, sometimes for our lives -- this kind of information, that directly affects us and the public sphere, ought to be free. My bank balance, on the other hand, is none of anyone else's business unless I choose to make it so.
Don't worry. We'll have run out of petroleum long before then.
Professor Roger Pinkham of Stevens Institute of Technology is a gem.
Not all PhDs are so arrogant as you suppose.
Yes, that will make for some players who are orders of magnitude more powerful than others. But MMOGs are also clearly designed with these players in mind, or at least those I've tried have been. It seems as if the majority of the maps, at least the more interesting parts of them, are designed expressly for the power gamers with few or none at all for the casual player. (Who is not the same as the novice player.) Not to mention extended campaigns requiring long hours of continuous cooperative play -- who, with a life, has time for that? I want to be able to log on, slay some bad guys, hang out with some cool people for a while, maybe for an hour or two at a time, and then go to bed. Show me a game where I can do that and maybe I'll play it.
It's not always possible to predict exactly how any particular appointee will affect the balance of the court. O'Connor was supposed to be a conservative, a Reagan appointee, but she turned out to be a very middle-of-the-road "swing vote". Fact is -- and I'm sure that some will be disappointed to hear this -- most SCOTUS decisions are based on law and precedent, not politics, and Justices are affected more by what theory under which they believe the Constitution should be interpreted than the political issue of the moment.
There are, of course, individual exceptions to this, and occasionally very disturbing ones, but law rather than politics is the general rule.
I don't believe your energy equation is correct here. Among other things such as more efficient processes, some crops yield far more oil per hectare than others and that can make a huge difference. See the Wikipedia article.
"Catalog" is a common neologism, but "catalogue" is correct American English, as are "analogue" and "dialogue". "Analog" and "dialog" are actually incorrect in most contexts, even in the U.S.
Incidentally, there's nothing particularly improper about "Where are you from?" The stilted constructions resulting from the absurd and artificial rule that sentences may not end with prepositions are far worse than the disease they purport to cure. This "disease" is non-conformity with Latin grammar, which is something inherent to Germanic languages and for which correction is not necessarily to be desired. Winston Churchill once told an advisor who edited one of his speeches to eliminate an ultimate preposition, "This is just the kind of thing up with which I will not put!"
The rule not to split infinitives is of similar provenance. You can't split infinitives at all in Latin even if you wanted to: it's unitary form there. Not so in English, where splitting them is perfectly natural. "Boldly to go where no man has gone before!" lacks a bit of rhetorical force, doesn't it?
In other words, sad experience has shown that it's very rare that people guilty of such crimes can be trusted not to commit them again no matter how long their incarceration. It seems therefore only prudent that they be "flagged" somehow. Laws requiring this are called "Megan's Laws" after the 8-year old victim of a twice-convicted (but released) child rapist, whose kidnapping, rape and murder prompted the passage of the first such law.
Good jargon (as opposed to the kind of polysyllabic blather adopted by some of the soft sciences as counterfeit jargon) is a set of shorthand phrases with specific, non-ambiguous technical meanings and as such tends to be opaque to the layman. In this particular case we're not even reaching that far: the words are simply archaic and were once in common use.
Chemo giveth, and chemo taketh away. I know one sufferer from lung cancer who didn't go into remission until he took himself off chemo, which was wrecking everything else in his body, and relied strictly on naturopathy and prayer. So maybe it cured you. Or maybe another less damaging cure was also available and this one just cost more and was more toxic.
Of course, anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything either way, does it?
Being the biggest in the world means you don't have to care.
Chill? My remarks were quite moderate, and I'm hardly a member of the anti-MS /. claque. If I were, I'd hardly be using XP at home, would I?
The second day drew about 400 rank-and-file Windows engineers, including people who don't necessarily focus on security features in their day-to-day work.
"Don't necessarily focus on security features"? If this is just the reporter making up his own description it's not so bad. But if he's just echoing what he was told by Microsoft or whoever his source was, then they're looking at this backward and probably have been for a long time.
Anyone who touches that code for any reason at all has to keep security in mind every time he does it. It doesn't matter if he's responsible for authentication or whatever else they're including under the rubric of "security features". Any bit of code is a potential vulnerability. It only takes one buffer overflow, one set of bounds that's not checked, one line of code that doesn't validate the terminator on an input text string, to create one. And then it's a security problem for everybody. If making non "security feature" programmers aware of these issues is a new thing at MS, they've been doing this all wrong for years. (As many have suspected, but seeing it possibly confirmed is still a bit of a shock.)
Especially as this should have some as no surprise. That Windows is insecure isn't exactly secret, esoteric knowledge.
I'm not talking about the religiously motivated circumcision common among Semitic peoples, but about the routine medical circumcisions performed on most males in the US at birth. This didn't come about until the late 19th-early 20th century for the reasons I stated. It was to prevent "masturbatory insanity." No, I shit you not.
Fact is, routine circumcision was instituted for a completely spurious reason, and one that most people would not now even consider desirable. (It was believed to reduce masturbation. The opposite is in fact true.) Modern rationalization for continuing the practice are different, but the only reason they exist is because there's this huge population of mutilated men to study. No doubt if for some reason female circumcision were to become common you could find plenty of justification for continuing it long after whatever initial stupid reason you had for doing it in the first place fell out of favor.
The US is the only industrialized nation where routine circumcisions are performed at birth. It is a surgery, and there are risks associated, especially when they're performed by doctors. (Jewish mohels are typically better at it, with lower complication rates and less pain to the recipient.) The benefits, such as they are, simply do not justify the risks or the undesirable side effects.
Ya know, it may well. But "oestrus" has nothing to do with eggs, at least etymologically. It's from a root meaning "frenzy". Draw your own conclusions. ;)
You correctly identified one misstatement that resulted from an incomplete edit. I meant to say, "'Passover' and 'Easter' are the same word in Greek," which is perfectly true.
That "Vine's" reference is ridiculously Anglocentric. Only in English and German (languages not spoken by most of Western European Christianity) is the day called something like "Easter", and even if you don't accept an early origin for Pascha you have to at least admit it was celebrated before Nicaea -- which was itself held centuries before the Saxons were converted. (They weren't even living in England yet at the time -- which, of course, did not bear that name.) The references we have from Nicaea and prior always describe Pascha as the feast of the Resurrection of the Lord. Here is a second century homily for the occasion.
"Easter" as a term for this holiday did not exist until the Saxons became Christians themselves. Any earlier connection with any similar-sounding words (a very unreliable guide to etymology, incidentally, absent any other evidence) goddess names, etc. is therefore wholly illusory. Anyone who claims there is one is doing so with no evidence at all to back him up. If this is an example of the reasoning to be found in The Two Babylons, Anglocentrism and all, it doesn't speak very well of that book. You can hardly expect me to accept it as a source, in the face of primary sources to the contrary.
As to the "connection" you posit between Eostremonath and Pascha, there is none except for the simple fact that, based on the Nicene computations, Pascha would nearly always have fallen within Eostremonath which corresponds more or less to our April. We don't need Bede to know that since the month itself is attested elsewhere. The problem with this ersatz goddes is exactly that she is not attested elsewhere.
I notice you're not telling me what edition of the Britannica you're quoting, and I suspect it to be fairly old. A lot of old manuscripts have been discovered since the 19th century. Even if references to holy days are scanty, we still have witness from the Apostolic era of Sunday worship and twice a week fasting. Melito's Peri Pascha was first preached in 190. This is within the lifetime of Irenaeus of Lyons, a disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna who was himself a disciple of John the Apostle and Evangelist, and also within the lifetimes of other great early Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Hermas the author of The Shepherd, and shortly after the martyrdom of Justin. This feast was clearly celebrated from a very early date.
At least until the polar ice cap melts. At that point if he wants to stay at the North Pole he'll need to invest in a houseboat or something. Personally, I think it'd be easier just to move to Canada.
Constantine wanted order in the Church which was wracked with controversy over a particular theological issue, so he called the council. After convening it, he left the discussions up to the bishops, who ended up condemning Arius. Constantine was so uninterested in the theological determination that he was actually baptized on his deathbed by an Arian bishop, a fact that cannot be reconciled with the notion that he was responsible for the council's decision. It actually took a second council to finally put an end to the schism.
Easter wasn't invented at Nicaea. It had been celebrated since the second century at least -- probably earlier; this is just when the avaiable documentary evidence was written. Of course, it wasn't called Easter, and wouldn't be until a few hundred years later when some obscure Germanic tribes were converted. It still isn't called that in most parts of the world. It's ancient and proper name by which it was known to the Fathers at Nicaea is Pascha, the Greek adaptation of the Hebrew Pesach: Passover. "Passover" and "Easter" are the same word in the Greek Bible. (What actually was done at Nicaea relative to Pascha was that a consistent method of determining when it should fall was decided upon. Before that there were a variety of methods, and different local churches were celebrating it on different days. But they were celebrating it.)
There's no credible cultural or etymological link between "Ishtar" (whom Constantine did not worship at any point in his life) and "Easter". "Easter" comes from the Anglo-Saxon month "Eostremonath", of obscure meaning. Bede claimed it referred to a goddess named Eostre, but he is writing generations after his people converted and not from living memory. There's no contemporary mention of this goddess at all, and modern scholars have concluded that he was just guessing and was probably wrong.
Christianity always had a distinctive organization from Judaism -- note from Acts 15 that questions were not referred to the Sanhedrin but to a Christian council, with the decision announced not by a kohan or rabbi, but by the local bishop. It grew even moreso after the destruction of the Temple in 70 and the levelling of Jerusalem in 120 when the Jewish population was scattered. It was clearly not Jewish by the time Nicaea was held, even among its Semitic adherents.
If this is your myth, you can live with it if you want, but please don't try to present it as fact. It just isn't.
You got that straight, buster! Measuring the airspeed velocity of coconut-laden swallows is not for undergrads! You must be a fully-trained scientist. With scales, and at least one duck.